Chuck Schuldiner Project

Friday, January 28, 2011

Terminate Damnation - Becoming the Archetype

Terminate Damnation may be  the only one of Becoming the Archetype's albums that I can say I truly enjoyed and was not just another nameless band doing another generic album under the label of christian metal. Terminate Damnation is genuine Technical Death Metal, which is the slightest bit unusual in the Christian Metal genre. Double bass kicks hard, vocals are well defined death growls, and the guitar has appropriate crunch and melody/speed.

The guitar sounds an awful lot like a video game, but in a really good way. the precision is pretty darn near perfect, if not perfect, with some massive sounding riffs and moderate dissonance. In a few songs there are acoustic solos which have a very dry, somewhat quick feel to them. It really provides good contrast for the blistering riffs. Not much else to say other than its great. The bass seems to be pretty laid back, essentially playing a slower version of the guitar riff, it has presence though, which is a plus.

The double bass drum  hard, and the drum fills are top notch. The blast beats however, annoy me to no end, I've always found that they are boring, and lack diversity, not too many of them though. the rest of the time, the drums sit there in the background and keep a fast tempo with decent accuracy, decapitated does a much better job of this though. The recording quality seems a bit sub par on the cymbals which sound a bit fuzzy, in case your a nerd like me and you care about that sort of thing.

The vocals are absolutely monstrous, essentially screaming death growls, its truly remarkable, and the vocalist does a good job spitting out the lyrics quickly enough to keep p with the instruments. They're really good towards the breakdowns, which, shockingly, were installed in a death metal album, with actual success.

I'm sure other bands have done the same thing, but Becoming the Archetype really made a masterpiece with Terminate Damnation.

No comments:

Post a Comment