Review Summary: Young And In The Way release their heaviest and darkest album to date
Young And In The Way is a pretty scary band. Their music is an intense mix of black metal and hardcore, the songs that aren't about self-loathing are about worshipping Satan and they spray their audience with blood. While many black metal bands do the whole ‘blood and Satan’ thing, Young And In The Way back it up with great tunes and ‘When Life Comes To Death’ is their heaviest and darkest album to date.
The album opens with ‘Betrayed By Light’, which immediately announces the bands intentions, with front man Kable Lyall screaming the album title before dropping into a teeth shattering riff. The album doesn't let up till the melodic ‘Take My Hand’ and even then, the album carries a strong atmosphere. Lead single ‘Be My Blood’ is a brutal ride with two breakdowns and cool lyrics (‘Satan feel me/Father feel me/Bringer of light/Be my blood), while tracks like ‘We Are Nothing’ slow down the tempo but lose none of the intensity.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with album. Firstly, although the album has an uncompromising sound and this works well on most of the tracks, some of them are flat out boring such as ‘Final Dose’ (which really has no right to be boring). The stabs at experimentation fall flat as well, such as the acoustic track ‘Shadow Of Murder’ which, while having the strong atmosphere previously mentioned, just ends up sounding a bit like a worse version of ‘In Her Shadow’ by Converge. With that being said, the closing epic ‘Embrace Extinction’ ends up being the best song on the album with a straight black metal riff exploding throughout the track before dropping into a heavy, mosh-worthy riff.
While it may not be the most original album and can be boring to listen to, ‘When Life Comes To Death’ is a worthy album to listen to for black metal, hardcore and general metal fans.
