Border of Misty Times

Hoo boy this is some tragically boring music, the kind of 'everything and the kitchen sink' style of metal that often comes out of Russia, with a fusion of melodic death, thrash, industrial, and nu-metal congealing into something just as listless as one would assume it. I can't remember a single riff on this album, which I typically consider the litmus test of value in a metal release. There's just nothing here; it's extremely rocklike, with piteously conventional song structures and no real sense of identity despite all the outwardly unique elements jammed in like so many jelly donuts in a fat man's mouth. The result is mostly the same as that unpleasant image: sickly sweet, kind of gross, and not filling despite the amount of material present.

The death metal seems to cribbed from 'Once Upon The Cross'-era Deicide, with a very similar style of claustrophobic riffing, but then some of the other riffs remind me of newer industrial/vaguely nu-metal bands like Fallen Man. I guess the thrash is mostly Teutonic with its openly discordant riffing and emphasis on fast gallop rhythms, but it never really fuses with the death metal; every different genre on this release is kept from every other in a very deliberate fashion, because the band knows how to write death metal riffs and knows how to write thrash metal riffs but has no clue how to make a death/thrash riff, reducing all the songs to ultimately meaningless combinations of riffs and rhythms that are all completely interchangeable and aren't interesting enough to listen to in the first place. The pseudo-Obituary/Autopsy vocal style doesn't add anything interesting either; despite the overtly modern aesthetic of the album cover, this mostly feels like bland worship of the oldschool with little to no elements befitting a band with such grandiose themes.

I guess the main complaint here is that nothing goes far enough; everything operates at a comfortable mid-fast tempo, all the riffs have been played before previous to 1996, and the band just seemed to want to make a 'death metal album' regardless of whether or not they had enough ideas to justify such a thing. Frankly, I doubt the band got any better from here; there's such a complete lack of inspiration anywhere on 'Border Of Misty Times' I really don't think that this could somehow be converted into something worthwhile with any amount of cajoling and refinement. This is just boring as hell and should be completely ignored.