Cult Leader : "A Patient Man"

It seems like a more spastic form of death metal with hard core sensibilities. The line is drawn more toward hard core going into the second song. "isolation in the Land of Milk and Honey" gets more melodic and moody toward the end, this is the side of the band I hope to hear more of going further into this album. It gives them a sense of dynamics that makes the frenzied blasting bits more tolerable. The song after this to my delight goes even further in this direction with clean baritone singing instead of screaming or growling. He has a pretty decent voice not at a Mark Lanegan level , but taking a similar approach.The instrumentation is very atmospheric and post-rock like. "A World of Joy" stays the course on this mellower bit of melancholic It does build into something heavier, which is dynamically appropriate at this point.

"Craft of Mourning" finds grindcore colliding against death metal. "Share My Pain" has a slower and more deliberate groove to it that falls more solidly on the death metal side of the equation. The guitar tone here is sick as hell. The lock in together and really smear you into the sidewalk with some of these riffs. They pick up the pace into more of a chug on "Arum Reclusa" which is with out question death metal. Most metal core to me is also death metal. The title track opens with a clean strum of guitar and the sung vocals returning. It has more tension like a storm is brewing behind the chords. This feeling is further explored on "the Broken Right Hand of God". I really like when the drums and bass come in with a groove that the guitar layers with ambient dissonance.


While this album is really good, I think some of the kids on their Bandcamp page suggesting this is album of the year might be smoking some rather decent weed if they are under such delusion. In the absence of Nails , I will certainly take this to help fill that void. I do like how this album is as heavy sonically as it is metal. While it is not the album of the year, I think it's one of the stronger albums of this ilk, which we will call death metal despite the 3 songs with clean singing . I'll give this album a 9. This was just released on Death Wish Inc.