Corrupting Influence

Prematory is a band I discovered at a local metal festival last year. The same night I fell in love with Bloodrocuted and Angelus Apatrida. On their official Facebook page the band describe themselves as high energy metal, a combination of thrash metal, death metal and hardcore. Well, I couldn't care less how you describe their musical style, I, for one, certainly like it!

Corrupting Influence is Prematory's second full length studio album and starts with Sledgehammer, a short instrumental track which starts off relaxed but slowly gains speed and aggression. After this warm up, the band kicks into high gear with Insignificance. A nice melodic track with a powerful, thrash metal style riff mixed in between. After that follows Down the Drain, a more brutal and faster song than its predecessor and one of the album's highlights in my opinion.

And so Prematory effortlessly juggles between various speeds and they just keep going strong until the album's end. Throughout the album you can just feel the band's power and energy pass on through you and you just get in the mood to go down the line in the gym, on the construction site or just at a live performance. Many tracks from the album talk about political hypocrisy and they would fit perfectly as riot songs. I can already imagine a gang of hairy protestors taking it to the streets on the tunes of Insignificance or Sentenced for life!

For pretty much the entire album, Prematory delivers excellent and powerful metal. At times fast-paced thrash and other times slower, more punk rock style music to have some variety. It isn't a chaotic mess, the band members know perfectly what they're doing and prove that through their performance in the album. The riffs are intensive and overall well performed, the lyrics are sung with convicting aggression, the drum and bass keep everything well together and the guitar solos are a true joy to listen to.

Personal favorite is the title track. After a few seconds, the band explodes and they go completely wild for one last time while Simon screams about the failing Western economy and how we, the regular people, have to make a fist and give the power back to ourselves!

I really wished that the album had a longer instrumental track. Slegdehammer is cool but way too short. With Jonas and Joeri jamming out one awesome solo after another, it would have been great to have a three of five minute track wherein they could completely steal the show like the axe men they are!

Honestly, I don't like the album's cover. Don't get me wrong, it isn't an ugly cover (hell, I even have a black and white t-shirt with the cover on it), but it doesn't fit the album's themes. It would have suited better for a power metal album. I would've suggested a black and white picture of a group of anarchists with the album's title on a huge banner hanging over them.

With Prematory, we have one more young but competent metal band marching on to metal stardom. An album I can warmly recommend to everyone who likes edgy, brutally sounding metal!