This is a band that has never struck me as anything special in the past, and it's certainly not happening now. The album starts off with a moody, semi-epic intro that goes right into a barrage of mid-tempo mediocrity. That's all the listener gets from every song on this record: poorly executed Meshuggah and Pantera worship. There are a few moments of pretty heavy riffing and technical drumming, but they get overshadowed by the poor use of transitions in the songwriting that never really pick the listener up.

As the album gets on, you'll notice the absence of clean vocals, something that's become a staple for this band and their sound: screamed verse/sung chorus or good cop/bad cop vocals. It's paint by numbers. I guess the clean vocals were traded in for some deep growls reminiscent of that popular thing going on right now called “death core” that has has all the boys trading in their flat irons for Job for a Cowboy T-shirts.

At the CD's end, we get a 14-minute-plus instrumental that pretty much recaps the entire mood of the record: riff after riff, with little to no change in tempo, plus the four and a half minutes of white noise at the end. What is the point in that, except to say “we have a 14-minute instrumental,” when the song should have stopped with the fadeout at nine and a half minutes? Lame. To me, this is the sound of a band trying to keep up while running out of steam they never really had in the first place. - Jamie Stewart