Review Summary: Repetition and lack of creativity plague this album, which results in pretty boring death metal.
So far, Knights of The Abyss gained popularity by having the right connections and signing onto an alright record label. With that, they got more popular by playing music that the absent minded think they want to hear. This band is part of a trend, if anything. Young people listen to what they think is awesome death metal, then wear awesome looking shirts that say “Knights of The Abyss” in illegible writing just to look hardcore.
At a glance, this album will immediately come off as extremely similar to The Black Dahlia Murder. That being said, if you do not like The Black Dahlia Murder, you aren’t likely to be fond of Knights of The Abyss either. Therein lies the problem; this album is quite identical to any other death metal album in its genre, and therefore will bore the listener to near death by bringing nothing new or different to the table. With this album, Knights of the Abyss are implying that they want to fit in with the more popular bands of the genre and maybe become some sort of tag along buddy for tours. Since nothing on the album is really original, it is unlikely that this band will grow any more in popularity.
The real downside of this album is the guitar tracks. The production on them sounds cheap and underdone, while the overall tone sounds just plane sloppy. A clear example of the poor quality is in
Suicide Reign from 1:30 to 1:50 where the backing guitar track sounds just plain pathetic. The written material doesn’t bring anything new to the listener, just heavy riffage, with almost each song set in the key of A#, that start with A#. The same notes are played in every song, just in different patterns and rhythms. In the end it just gets so repetitive and uncreative that it becomes boring to the point of tears. The track
Running Out Of Earthly Wealth starts out moderately different than the other tracks, but quickly becomes only an attempt at creativity when it progressively falls back into sounding like every other song on the album.
Creativity seems to be the bane of this band, since the vocalist sounds like every other vocalist in the death metal genre. While the low growl sounds pretty okay, the higher pitched shrieks ruin them by doing nothing but making the listener question why they are even in the tracks. The songs
Running Out Of Earthly Wealth,
Exploitation and
The Penalty Of The Tyrant each start out with the vocalist shrieking out high pitched, “YAAAAAAH”, that come off as just completely unnecessary. That leaves the drummer as the one fail safe element that makes this a bearable death metal album. He doesn’t overdo blast beats, and portrays clean hands and feet with quick and tricky rhythms.
With the album clocking at a little over thirty minutes long, an almost obnoxious amount of repetition makes most of the tracks almost completely indistinguishable from one other. Leave this album alone unless you are curious about what
not to sound like, if you ever decide to make music.
