The Partisan Turbine

The Partisan Turbine are an interesting band; placing the crunching breakdowns of the current deathcore wave amongst music that sounds taken from a faster Circle of Dead Children or Devourment. They're not just about mosh-candy for the scenesters; solos, artillery-like drumming and disturbing vocals play a much bigger role than obligatory beatdowns and gang vocals. Imagine a Waking The Cadaver that doesn't utterly shit all over everything that makes death metal and deathcore good, or a Misericordiam with guitars you can hear. I loved their EP, Surgical Assault, for all these reasons. On top of this, it was the first time I ever heard pig squeals and low inhales genuinely work and actively compliment the music - in being able to perform a much higher standard of inhale, the vocalist provided a performance that sounded much like the monster from every nightmare H.P. Lovecraft ever had.

However, there are many of you who don't like pig squeals, and you'll be glad to know that for this, their full-length, they've been reigned in - noticably, since every song from the EP except Vast Illumination returns. However, these remade tracks sound strange with more traditional death metal vocals - everything sounds less impenetrably brutal than the old versions. The vocals are still great, the instrumentals are superb, but the more generic death growls just don't work as well - in fact the whole vocal performance isn't as good. "Inertia", my first and favourite TPT song, has never sounded as flat and (relatively) un-brutal.

It doesn't help that the production is appalling. The EP was produced very well, but here everything sounds muffled and fuzzy. Music like this, I've always felt, should be produced to be as crystal clear as possible, like the band is playing right into your bleeding eardrums. Admittedly the guitars have been raised in the mix, the only flaw with the EP, but the lack of sound quality detracts overall.

However, the music overall is as great as it was in the EP; the drums - the driving element of the music - are astonishing, with gravity blasts belted out effortlessly, the guitars combine (now audible) downtuned churning and scything solos, the bass is...genuinely there at times...and the vocals, while not as exemplary as on the EP, are more than functional. It's a good solid, admittedly CoDC-copying album - but I'd recommend the EP more.