It's been two years since there last impressive offering and while I am disappointed that this is an EP with two new original and two covers rather than a full length, I will take what I can get. The opening track is pretty standard death metal though well-crafted and executed, more straight forward than I expected from them. This band has created something that captures the steam rolling aggression of Deicide combined with the ever-shifting grooving riffage of Morbid Angel, meaning they have latched onto the best elements of death metal and woven them into something that is their own.
They are precise not technical as they do not create riff Twister that gets tied up in the math of the riffs. Are they very capable at pulling out a full shred guitar solo? Yes, they are though the song itself it not just bread to put the solo between. I am not sure why they chose the In Flames song that they did to cover. I have never been into In Flames so this might as well be an original as well. There are more heavy-handed guitar harmonies which I know plays into the kind of heavy-handed melodic Swedish brand of death metal that the band is known to be the godfathers of. To be honest I would much rather have heard another original from these guys instead. They play the song well; it just does not have clear cut point.
Now the cover they do of the Candlemass classic "Bewitched" is another story altogether. This kind of underscores the problem they had with covering In Flames, what works with "Bewitched" is it is not the same genre of metal, it is doom so that gives them room to do something different. Where In Flames is kind of redundant as it is not that far removed from what Abysmal Dawn already does as a death metal band. This had already been released as a Flexi single, it is good to have it here. The vocals are the most impressive part as they nailed it. Overall, I will give this a 9, it is a pretty impressive showing but I think they could have done more yet what we got is still very impressive.
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