Dawn of the Apocalypse

Before you get carried away with this album, let me just say this album is over hyped, claiming this album is the greatest death metal album is absurd, especially when you take into account some of early releases by Morbid Angel.

Let's not forget however, that 79 is a good mark (good not great) and while this album isn't the greatest death metal around, it's still pretty good nonetheless.

Let this review make you stop and reconsider before you rush off and buy this album off Amazon like I did. When I bought it, I felt fairly happy with my purchase, thinking that I was in for a fairly solid ass kicking from a heavy, insane death metal album. Well, here I am some what disenchanted for again, assuming the album was one thing and getting another. I was expecting a very heavy album, ala Bloodline/His Majesty but I didn't get it. So that was a huge disappointment. I would have been much happier with the album if it was as heavy as the aforementioned album.

The heaviness of the album aside, it just isn't that good. The riffs can be dull and uninteresting at times and the solos while, incredibly technical, just aren't satisfying. I didn't get many head bangs out of this album. Again, if the album had been heavier, we wouldn't probably have this problem.

Usually, good vocalists leave after 1 album or so, Themgoroth and Pehr Larsson are examples. Thorn is no exception and decided to leave after this album for unknown reasons. He is a great vocalist who changes between high pitched shrieks and deep guttural death growling. He's way better than the retard who replaced him, i.e. Glen Benton. Thorn performs vocals with a great deal of passion and his vocal ability along with the drumming is probably the strengths of the album.

The drumming as alluded to above is very good. The drummer is tight and can perform pretty technical drum techniques pretty well.

You could be forgiven to think the band was from Spain as this album has some acoustic parts in their songs (and one acoustic song). I thought it was a nice feature to include on the album.

Overall, I was disappointed with this, the main reason being I got swept away in the glowing reviews this album received. Yeah, it has its moments but all in all, this album truly is over hyped. The true disappointment however, comes from the album not being what it could have been. On this album we have a bunch of great musicians and instead of a mind blowing death metal masterpiece, we only get a good album.