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Well, this is a surprise. Italian death metal is a rare enough thing, in fact when I think of Italy, the only band which immediately sticks out in my mind is Mortuary Drape. Horrid plays what I tend to call "MDMWB" or "Melodic Death Metal With Balls". Other practitioners of this style include Intestine Baalism, The Chasm and Arghoslent, but Horrid don't really sound like any of those. They're not as dark, thrashy or NWOBHM-ish as any of those three examples, instead their sense of melody is oddly reminiscent of old-school US power metal, mixed in with choppy fluid drumming – very precise and quick, without ever venturing into blastbeat overkill – while the vocals are your stock-standard guttural growl. They throw in a fair few "medieval" passages too, meaning sweeping warlike folky riffs over semi-martial rhythms.

There's certainly a lot of old-school feeling in Horrid's sound, not to mention plenty of epic qualities. In particular, "Harmonic Devastation" clocks in at an impressive 9 minutes, and there's no lack of expansive riffs to be found elsewhere either. There's one big fuckoff though, which costs this album half a point: THE FUCKING SPACEWASTER. Yep, "Outro" is a rather misleading title since it's actually a song – which also happens to feature some decent clean vocals, an inclusion which often fails miserably but works quite well here - followed by an utterly pointless 6 minutes of silence before an equally pointless 15 seconds of a slowed-down voice saying something incomprehensible. For fucks sake, if you're going to put this shit on the end of a CD, the least you can do is make it something that's worth sitting through a bunch of silence for. Grr.