Eternal Decision

If you’ve never heard of Eternal Decision yet, you probably never will. The band made some fame when their song “Hunger” was mistaken over Napster for being the new Metallica song. Thinking this was new Metallica I was excited, but I soon learned it was really Eternal Decision. So I bought the first two ED albums.


The singer sounds a lot like Hetfield on some songs, but it ends there. He has a very low vocal tone that I would best set with Phil Anselmo. In fact the first track, Risen, kind of sounds like Fukcing Hostile and Things I Say sounds like Cemetary Gates. But of course this is a Chrisitian metal band, so all lyrics are Christian oriented. The singer does however do a lot of those “rough” sounds – you know the thing that Hetfield does to ever consonant sound at the end of a word, which can get annoying after awhile.


The guitar work is pretty good on this album, though not genuine. At times it sounds like Metallica Load/Reload years, with a mix of Pantera, so if you like this kind of style you might want to look at getting this album. No riff or solo stands out, which is why the album is not that great. Its not that the riffs get reused and boring, it is just that none want to jump out at you. The good part of this album is though the band is not signed to a good label, they still have produced a good sounding album. All instruments mesh, there is no bass overpowering guitars sound or drums blast so hard you can’t hear the singing, etc.


The pretty much only good thing about this album is that they have some catchy tunes. Even though the lyrics are Christian oriented, they are pretty cool at times. Take for example Imminent Destruction which talks about the end of the world. You actually feel like this would be playing on the soundtrack to Armageddon. Highlights on this album to check out are the aforementioned Imminent Destruction and Hunger, along with Risen and Overflow. It is not the best metal, but it is definitely worth a try!

Thrash happens to be my metal of choice. That includes all really all kinds of thrash, be it post-thrash, bay-thrash, death/thrash, crossover, whatever. That might have been because when I first started listening to metal, it started off as Pantera, then that metallica shit, and pretty much, I got into it all. Me being a Christian happens to enjoy checking out some heaven metal hear and there, after all I am huge on the works of Believer, and have checked out stuff like Living Sacrifice, Sacrament, Vengeance Unleashed. I am also familiar with Eternal Decision. Finally, I decided to check out their albums, and I have to say, so far, not really all that impressed.

This stuff is quite laughable in many aspects, but also a decent listen here and there. Eternal Decision is laughable in a sense that the vocalist tries so hard to sound a lot like James from Metallica, and how the music is pretty much unoriginal, with no real creativity, but who knows, perhaps it wasn’t suppose to be that way. Hell, they even have a groove-ish quality, not just groove in general, but more in the vein of Pantera’s vulgar display of Power. Just check out the title track Risen, not all that great, and seems to have been a rip-off of New Level.

The decency of this crap is in Power, which is catchy, but I gotta tell you, I did end up laughing, because of how much the singer sounds like James. It’s totally hilarious. Though I have read throughout history, Christian Metal was never really all that successful and pretty much just clones. Believer made it somewhere, and was probably the best one out there. Even God-haters love Believer, and that’s really saying something. Living Sacrifice’s thrash is some-what decent, but unoriginal, and as it seems, that’s quite alright, even if it did sound like Slayer.

To get to the bottom line, I really don’t see how these guys are all that great, let alone how they made it. I guess they just got lucky. Nothing really too fancy, but at first, in some ways, it stands a chance. Good drumming, and decent soloing on the guitars. Rhythm guitar is terrible, and the bass is terrible. I do not really need to mention the vocals, because it makes these guys seem like a Christian cheap-Metallica clone. Sorry guys, really disappointed.