Cover Art: Nightrage has been around for quite awhile now and they consistently put out solid cover art and consistently good metal. Their past cover art featured among other things, skulls and some bald looking guy, this one is taking cue from the former and it actually feels pretty different than what they usually produce for cover art. In fact; if I didn’t know about better this could pass off as just about any hard rock or even post-rock/emo/pro-rock kind of album. It’s pretty tasteful but I don’t really think it reflects the kind of music being played here, it feels like a poster for a new age art gallery or performance art poster. Yea, cool but not very metal.
Album Review: I already mentioned that Nightrage consistently puts out solid melodic death metal and this album is no different. The riffs are there, the melodies catchy, the drumwork solid, harsh vocals good, occasional clean vocals refreshing; about as clockwork you can get from a melodeth band and that’s a good thing. There isn’t a whole lot of innovation or fancy instrumentals going on here, although it seems the band is trying for more solos with a slightly softer feel with less speed than previous offerings. However, one thing that I did notice was that overall the songs themselves are much shorter. The album has 13 tracks and out of that pool only two are longer than 4 minutes, the majority just barely breaking 3 minutes which is a bit odd since metal songs tend to range from around 4-5 minutes long granted the genre being played. This is fine since each song is filled with quality and it seems like they didn’t want to bloat any tracks with unnecessary stuff although I do feel some tracks should have been longer. Overall a great offering from Nightrage.
Score: 8/10