Not bad at all. Here's some relatively straightforward metallic hardcore that takes the traditional road to varyingly paced chord progressions and old school flavor accented by added heaviness and plentiful melody to keep things fresh and interesting, while the yelling vocals relentlessly deliver sincere lyrics that are more involved and less repetitious than your average hardcore band - all within compact timeframes that never even hit three minutes. "Dead Salutes" is fairly straightforward in its use of octave chords and pulsing midpaced tempos; "Heaven Sent, Hell Bound" picks up the pace as well as the energy level for a little over a minute of speedy hardcore; "Diamond Lanterns" maintains that pacing but brings in a little more of a metallic edge to some of the picking patterns and once more tosses in plenty of octave chords; "Moving Targets" drops back to a crunchier midpaced run with somewhat of a rocked out vibe to its chord progressions and post-hardcore smatterings; and "Ad Infinitum" breaks out a couple of slow paced melodic leads over dissonant textures and a few borderline pop-punk palm-muting riffs, not to mention one of the most chugging rhythms herein for contrast. They close things out with a cover of "When Death Closes Your Eyes" by 108, which is all fine and good, certainly a solid track, but far from 108's best, so I actually think This is Hell's original work outshines the cover big time - but that's a positive trait, for sure. The recording's pretty damn good for my money. I'd like to hear the bass given a hint more differentiation from the guitars, which could stand to be slightly clearer themselves, but the drums sound fine and the vocals sound excellent. The mix favors the vocals just a touch, but for the most part they're good to go and barely need to mess with anything. The guitar tone is amply heavy to beef things up big time, but still retains enough color for the melodies to stick out and make their mark, so that's a good sign. The layout looks nice and consistent with some dark illustrations of mummified figures in spider webs or whatever, using a hint of metallic gold text to boot. Lyrically the topics aren't far removed from what your average band deals with, as far as relationships, or searching for more out of life, but the structures of the lyrics aren't generic at all, and there's a greater amount of content than most bands of this nature would drop into such short songs: "The only things that ever seem to last are fuck you songs and epitaphs. So now we write new testaments on paper bags with ballpoint pens. I'd rather listen than write, I'd rather sit down than fight. When every day is the same as the last, we'll know our time is running out fast. Our lungs are working on borrowed time. These days we steal will be remembered as crimes..." This is one of the better releases to date from State of Mind, and I'll be looking forward to hearing more from these guys. This fucker's short as hell, but it definitely gets the point across. Good stuff.
[State of Mind]
Running time - 13:33, Tracks: 6
[Notable tracks: Heaven Sent, Hell Bound, Diamond Lanterns, Ad Infinitum]
State of Mind Recordings - http://www.stateofmindrecordings.com
