Our Place of Worship is Silence : "the Embodiment of Hate"

This California death metal band has begun to benefit from enough hype to make me curious. The album's  opener is different enough to catch your attention with samples and feed back laced atmosphere. When we get to the meat of the matter and are waist deep in the carnage of "Resplendent Misery" I am listening for what these guys do that is outside of the typical death metal norm. The vocals are low growls. The drumming is on point as a death metal has to be, and the thickly low tuned guitars are pretty nasty. There is a cavernous chug of the murky darkness of "Feast of Martyrdom". I can appreciate their Incantation influence as I would rather hear that than a band that sounded like Cannibal Corpse or some tech death bull shit. In the final minutes of this song I feel they tend to settle on banging it out rather than asking the song where it wanted to go.

These songs are not weighed down with elements that leave them wandering past the five minute. Some times they are a little too straight forward like "Murdered While Praying" which sounds like they took a riff from the previous song and used that as the jumping off point for this one. Even here there are some cool accents, but they have not only cemented their own sound but are getting a little mired down in it. They get lost in acceleration on "To Deceive the Universe". Sure this one has a couple of cool riffs, but the rule here is cool riffs alone don't make a good song. "Our Place of Worship" is a barrage of blast beats and sonic lashings with no other intention aside from being jarring.


 Not only here but at other points in the album the vocals are layered so they do no solely rely on the low growl but have some agonized yells of torment mixed in. With the closing buzz of "Church of Atrocity" nothing was really added, except it was perhaps slightly blackened, but the novelty of getting black metal mixed in with death metal these days is pretty common place. I'll give this album a 7 it starts strong, but runs out of new ideas mid way into it. If you love death metal, then you needed fewer shades of dynamic color, so this might not bother you as much.