Review Summary: It's been done over nine-thousand times before.
Knights of the Abyss:
Dustin Hadlock - Vocals
Nicholi Florence - Guitar
Cody Brectel - Guitar
John Seabury - Bass
Andy Rysdam - Drums (ex-Job for a Cowboy)
Deathcore seems to be a label applied to a lot of decent bands that have a knack for sounding exactly the same. A few of the “genre” have established their own sound within the genericism of the style: Job For A Cowboy, Through The Eyes Of The Dead, Glass Casket, The Red Chord, All Shall Perish, Ion Dissonance, In Death We Rise, From A Second Story Window, etc.
Knights of the Abyss, unfortunately brings nothing new to the table. Really bands in the genre rarely do. They seem to have cloned every aspect of Job for a Cowboy’s Doom EP, minus any sense of emotion. Think As Blood Runs Black in comparison to The Black Dahlia Murder. The music sounds identical to every mediocre song written by the band they worship. Their vocalist seems to try very hard to imitate JFAC vocalist Johnny Davy, minus pig squealing.
Aside from my definite distaste for the album, it’s not all that horrid. It’s your fairly standard slam death influenced melodic death metal with a rare tough guy hardcore part here and there. The vocals are fairly good, though some of the inhaled parts are very weak. Rysam does some clean blasting and keeps things nice and mid-tempo, his feet are pretty even and quick, and he shows a fair sense of groove in the slow parts. The guitarwork is good, it’s just fairly disinteresting, think, “it’s been done before,” incarnate.
They show potential if they were slightly less generic. The drummer and vocalist are great, with a few flaws.
On the bright side, the album’s some deathcore with actual hardcore elements.
