Where Moth and Rust Destroy

If so, they are failing terribly. This is a modern power-metal album that seems almost like a shadow of the last few Rage LPs. Where Rage has kept itself vibrant and dynamic (mostly from the fact that at some point they were Legendary German Speed Metal, and they haven't forgotten it), this band just kinda plods along. In fact, that is what this album is: PLODDING. The vocalist sounds a bit like Peavy at times, but the riffs are just flat out uninteresting when all is said and done. Every once in a while, they pick up the pace, and bust into some solid power metal riffs, but for the most part they just throw together boring passages, separated by "random instrumentation interludes", for lack of a better term. There's the fiddle or whatnot in Drawn and Quartered, though most of the time, it's just badly done soloing.

I think when all is said and done, these guys are trying to be doom metal. But, Tony Iommi, this is not. The riffs are bland and pretty much seem like rehashes of stuff done before... a slightly slower version of the main riff of The Ripper shows up in A Ghost at the Wheel, for example.

Again, every once in a while, they speed things up, for example the middle section of Architeuthis (giant squid, for anyone wondering), where they sound almost EXACTLY like Rage's Unity or Soundchaser. Except again, where the vocalist gets really insipid. For example, there's a SPOKEN section, and then there's a yelling vocalist that just fucking sucks, and in the first song, the title track, the chorus is so forced, so completely uninspired... "Where moth! and rust! destroy!" That's great.

Oh and finally, the album is far the fuck too long. It's about 62 minutes or something, which really is not something that a band should try to do, especially when they can barely fit in 36 minutes of music. It's just too many bad ideas that are stringing the songs together. Either an uninteresting riff passage, or a bad, over-the-top bellowing/whiney vocal performance (healing waters of the Tigris, main chorus, for example), and in general it sounds like four people with four stomachaches attempting to create metal. Even when they speed up in this song, they play generic speed metal riffs, with AWFUL barked vocals and random melodic licks that just make no sense in the context of the song.

Oh yeah, and I'm not sure if the last song was meant as a joke? It sounds like a parody of Triumph of Death, and it just isn't funny. This is just a terrible album. Modern metal, suck my balls.