Volume One

As many of you have noticed for a long time, for several recent years, the metal scene in America has been filling up with bands that are mixing strong elements of both metal and hard core to create their own styles. Devilinside is another contender to enter these modern grounds with their own mix that includes also touches of noise and some industrial-tinged guitar bits. After just a few songs I began to hear both the biggest strong and weak points on this album. Vocalist Jamie Gonzales is the biggest trump card that this album has. His harsh screaming has a lot of power and fits this kind of music and its hate-filled lyricism very well. The problems begin when the compositions are taken under a magnifying glass. Almost every song tries to be as heavy and brutal as possible but overall almost nothing sticks out as that special with the exceptions of a few nice riffs here and there. Each songs just grinds away with painfully several being totally unmelodic sludge that has no hook or groove that would latch on to my ear. The faster, pumping tracks Bane Of Existence and Burdens Gift are the rare exceptions among here that stick out as quite good whole songs and actually have some nice fist-raising energy in them. The feeling of un-memorability is more unfortunate because it doesn’t seem to be caused by the fact that the guys couldn’t write a decent melody. The acoustic and a bit haunting instrumentals Canyon and Transition In E Minor have very nice and catchy melodies, but these elements just haven’t been transferred to the heavier songs. And now that were talking about instrumentals, this album features the same kind of track listing as for example Pestilences great Testimony Of The Ancients, where half of the songs are much shorter instrumentals/pieces of weird sounds. But here most of the short pieces are mostly industrial-type noise or just totally bland riffage that floats by without a trace, and because of that the purpose and use of so many instrumentals is beyond me. Devilinside has potential in their sound and especially in their vocalist Gonzales. But with fellow rising bands from the States such as God Forbid and Shadows Fall tearing heads apart left and right with their new albums, a piece of work this mediocre cant really hold up. Time will tell if this bands abilities will be used more effectively in the future.