It is difficult to review this album with complete honesty because the label which released it is owned by a close friend of mine, but it's a matter of deontological ethics to be completely honest about your reviews all the time, for me. Just as a starting note, this album has been recorded in '99 but it was only 6 years later that it saw its release. We're talking about a rather old band here, adept at playing some sort of atypical Death Metal with broken rhytms, screams, technical drum changes, but all the way kept heavily into mid-tempos. The few accelerations hardly stand up to the average pace of today's bands, and anyway they're relatively marginal, just used to add variety to songs which already have a good personality each one of them. Personally a few things sound really terrible in my ears within album however, and these are a couple of Heavy Metal riffs disguised under heavy distortion, plus some solos which are really, really mellow. I can see someone into Grand Belial's Key to be into this band too, but it's a scene which just doesn't belong here. A friend of mine compared this to Bal Sagoth (ehe) but to be serious, we're far from that. While the general feel of the album is more than good, these sing along rides and happy tarantella riffs a la Iron Maiden really feel like a cold shower the moment they fall. I have to say, this is one of the most mature, well compsoed albums you could find today, if you can stand the huge traditional Metal influence, but to me the Metal in this Death Metal album has to go.

 

Tracks (7): 1 - Elemental Prisms 2 - Nature Of Descent 3 - Drowning Pisces 4 - (Tlachallel)The Arcing Obsidian 5 - Antimatter Initiates 6 - The Suicides Of Saturn 7 - Raising The Serpent