Undeceived

Extol falls under the delightful if not somewhat cursed genre of Christian metal. I say cursed because most Christian metal albums seem to fall under two categories.

Category 1: The band wants to play heavy music for their lord Jesus Christ, but also want to please their congregation. This means that they want to play a harsh type of metal such as black or death metal, but don't want to make music hating Christians pissed off.

Category 2: The band seems to have lost any slither of lyric writing and seem to fall under the 'Deicide lyrical' phase. This time though they take their lyrics from hymms and seem to repeat "Jesus loves you." over and over again which gets pretty damn annoying. (Yes I'm a Christian, but if I want to hear the Jesus loves me song I'll listen to it on the radio. Mmmkay thnks bye.)

Thankfully Extol doesn't fall under the second category since their lyrics are actually pretty intellegent. No what befalls the album "Undecieved" is that the album sounds too undone, unpolished, and as if though they were trying to please a local baptist convention.

If you listen carefully you can hear the moments throughout the album where Extol attempted to make this album black metal. Oh wait let me not offend the Satanists, I mean unblack metal, ok that's better. There are the typical fast thrash riffs in certain areas, and a few blastbeats. The vocalist did make use of the distorted black metallish vocals and points.

Sadly though this unblack metalness doesn't last very long, and soon gives way to progressive metal. Normally this wouldn't be bad I love the time changes of progressive metal, the wonderful guitar melodies and harmonies that most people couldn't do, the time changing of the differant drums beats and so on. Extol manages to do all of this, but many Christian metal bands seem to perform this sort of cop out.

Perhaps I'm giving Extol this score because I was expecting something alot better. It's still a very good album, and if your into Christian metal you should definately pick this album up. Just don't expect the unblack metal portions of it to last very long.

79/100