Renaissance by Death

The guitar players in this band had some degree of talent, but unfortunately bad production, amateurish singing, and poor songwriting ultimately sinks the music. The most obvious problem here is the vocals, which are annoying throughout the entire album (especially when he tries to do a gruff talk). The vocal melodies are often off-kilter, making it sound like the vocals were meant to be on a different song.

The lyrics are of a christian persuasion, and some of them are pretty heavy handed. For example, the song Fallen Deceived talks about going to hell for turning "away from God's love". Though when you think about it, that's just the Gospel message: you must either love God or suffer. So what can they do? Sure it's an intellectually bankrupt and contradictory thing to say that someone *must* use their free will to love God, but that's what the Bible says, so that's what Betrayal sings.

As far as the guitar work goes, the riffs and lead guitar work isn't bad in itself, but the tone (especially of the lead) sucks, and at times attains to a nails-on-chalkboard level of annoying. So while there's some good thrash on here (e.g. Assassin In the Midst), the production and vocals are so bad that the guitars often feels like they're buried in quicksand. Not that the song writing would have been spectacular anyway; in fact, some songs sound like stuff was just randomly thrown together. This album is definitely not as as coherent as their follow-up.