Somewhat raw melodic Swedish styled death metal from Mexico. This is definitely along the more aggressive side of that whole genre, as the tempos tend to be pretty fast and there's a lot of tremolo picking. The solos are often quite cool, but they don't do a whole lot of those slick dual guitar harmonies or anything like that. Aside from a few minor production issues, the only thing I don't really like about this is the vocals. The standard midrange sneers are fine, but then there's another vocalist who does some higher screams, and they don't sound all that different - aside from the fact that they irritate me and disrupt the listening experience in my opinion. Musically I think these guys write some fucking awesome riffs, and the solos are well put together... so they have a lot going for 'em. A few tracks like "The Night of Damnation" and "Flames From a Lost Battle" start out much slower and have a driving sort of early Entombed crunch before heading back towards the more melodic picking patterns, which is a nice change of pace. As for the sound, it's just too rugged. The mix isn't bad. Guitars tend to hold down the core, the bass is in there, the drums are on the clicky side but they're not overpowering, etc. I think they could get away with the roughness of the guitar tone if the drums were more natural and the bass was louder, or if everything was basically thicker and slightly cleaner. The layout's not the best I've seen, it's a little crude and pasted together looking, but it's fairly consistent and the text is all legible and stuff like that. As the album title suggests most of the lyrics deal with war and bloodshed: "Since the principle of mankind, the wish of war firmly domains, The racism and religion wars, anything is forward as a pretext, Everyday is a perfect day to die, or let someone be killed, Men idolatrous the murderers, no matter how many they kill..." Not bad. Based on the band name and all the talk of war I really thought this was going to be something more akin to brutal death/grind or black metal, but with some work these guys could kill. They're very competent in the riff department, so who knows?
[Sempiternal]
Running time - 48:15, Tracks: 12
[Notable tracks: Of Pain and Chemical Death, Flames From a Lost Battle]
Sempiternal Productions - http://www.sempiternalproductions.com
