I always like when an extreme metal album cranks up and I hear unfriendly, atonal riffing. That shows you this is a band who get it, and get what this kind of music is supposed to be for. This starts off with a blast of evil, ugly sound and then carries through a whole album of often surprising stuff. There's at least one former member of Arsis in this outfit, and it shows with the technical, unconventional structures and odd time signatures. Also the fact that this is not unrelentingly brutal, and flashes sequences of surprising melody intermixed with the slashing attack. It doesn't all hold together, and like a lot of more technical music it tends to get in its own way more than it should. This is interesting if not compelling.