Inherit the Meek

I got some hate mail last week, apparently I don't give enough high scores in my demo reviews, well to be honest there aren't a lot of good demos. The best I've received all year is easily Deathbed For A Weakening Spirit by Shrine of Scars, and from what I have been listening to the past week, it looks like Shrine of Scars will stay at the top.

My fellow reviewer, Musashi, hands me a big bag of envelopes filled with demos every month or so and from there it is up to me to pick out what demo to review each week. I try and do them in the order they were received, but if I see some cool artwork or read an interesting band bio I will skip them to the top of the pile. Command Presence was one of these bands.

I noticed the info sheet for Command Presence about a week ago and for some reason I was drawn to it right away. I don't know why but something about made me want to listen to it. The bio described them as progressive thrash influenced by the likes of Testament, Pantera, Megadeth, and Death. Quite an impressive list, and not surprisingly, Command Presence falls short of their influences.

While they do manage to come up with some truly awesome riffs, Command Presence is more often boring and repetitive. There are three very cool songs on this cd, the other seven are rehashes of the better songs, but worse. The worst song is track five, "Heaven Sent." It is twelve minutes of pure boredom. It is slow and meandering, there isn't any real purpose to the song and it should have ended after four minutes.

What drags this record out of the gutter are the few awesome riffs. If it wasn't for these riffs on tracks 1, 4, and 8, this record would have been a generous two skulls at best.

Originally published @ www.metaljudgment.com (c) 2002