Behold the Lion

The mid-00’s saw a wave of American metalcore bands popping up everywhere. They more or less all looked the same and had the same kind of vibe about them, including album covers. Taking a quick glance at Woe of Tyrants, one can be fooled to put them into the metalcore category, however they are rather fare from it. Woe of Tyrants is a blisteringly fast and somewhat progressive/melodic death metal band that are on a mission to destroy!

Woe of Tyrants debut “Behold, the Lion” wants to be a monster that grabs you by the throat as soon as the mellow intro “Conception” is over. From then on and until the finale that is “Fable Thy Destination” there’s pretty much no stepping on the breaks for these youngsters. Riff after riff after riff is smashed into the listers face and vocalist Chris Catanzaro growls and screams are heard all over the place. As soon as one song has ended the other immediately bursts forth. And more or less every song has Catanzaro screaming his lungs out from the beginning. And he just doesn’t let up! He growls and does a few screams more or less throughout every song, only to be paused by the brief solos that are scattered around on the album. This is truly a bombardment of metal. They even toss in a few southern metal and thrash riffs here and there, but they are so brief that it won’t annoy the devoted melo-death metal fanatic. And melodic is another key word here!! Almost epic in some of its riff - they remind me of With Faith or Flames a lot.

The production is good and not too flashy for a melodic death metal release. The floor toms do sound a tiny bit flat though, but it’s not too annoying for me. So what’s not to love here?? Constant amazing growls, epic riff after riff and no letting up on the energy - well, that’s the exact problem that Woe of Tyrants has on their debut! They simply don’t let the songs breath! They are clearly super talented and could probably do any metal genre they wanted to, but writing melodic death metal in the highest gear for 35 minutes or so becomes tiresome. They should have thrown in an instrumental or fleshed out the solo-parts or thrown an acoustic guitar somewhere in there. Just do something else instead of doing the same song over and over. It’s a shame, as there’s so much talent here…. But don’t let this review scare you to much, as I guarantee you that the follow-up has fixed all the problems this debut has. Great things are just around the corner!