Entrenched is another US based war metal outfit, combining thrash and death metal to create a militant, savage piece of album self-released a couple of months ago. I’m easily reminded of the lately reviewed Spearhead, but we’re not exactly dealing with identical music.
Preemptive Strike never goes into utterly fast tempos, but successfully retains in relatively mid-paced speeds in which the simple power chord riffs do wonders. It is also much thanks to the rusty and upfront guitar tone that makes the palm-muted riff menace so ass kicking, even though the compositions aren’t that outstanding themselves. But what the band loses in unoriginal songwriting, it takes back in the sheer power of the instruments and production. This is what makes me return to the album moderately often: it sounds so good.
There are, however, great songs as well, it’s not all about a frigging guitar tone. ”Bred to Kill”, ”ICBM” and ”Landbrecher 666” are an unbeatable string of crushing, belligerent tracks after which ”Frenzied Amputation” convincingly rumbles in the spheres of murky death metal. At this point, the singer’s low grunts are put to their best use. ”Anesthetic Death” regularly crawls with creepy guitar picking, a welcome feature after all the constant firing. The last three tracks, starting with ”Burnt and Destroyed”, are the least convincing tracks of the bunch, kind of stuck in place and not providing anything the songs before them hadn’t delivered already.
The album leaves a lot better aftertaste than many its contenders, though I would still be wary to go over three stars. If the stagnancy in the latter part of the album was fixed (heck, you could just remove them all the way and so you would have an awesome 6-track whole that would fittingly end after ”Anesthetic Death”), Preemptive Strike could even be among my favourite war metal records. A well-done album, and I am looking forward to hearing more from these guys.
Preemptive Strike never goes into utterly fast tempos, but successfully retains in relatively mid-paced speeds in which the simple power chord riffs do wonders. It is also much thanks to the rusty and upfront guitar tone that makes the palm-muted riff menace so ass kicking, even though the compositions aren’t that outstanding themselves. But what the band loses in unoriginal songwriting, it takes back in the sheer power of the instruments and production. This is what makes me return to the album moderately often: it sounds so good.
There are, however, great songs as well, it’s not all about a frigging guitar tone. ”Bred to Kill”, ”ICBM” and ”Landbrecher 666” are an unbeatable string of crushing, belligerent tracks after which ”Frenzied Amputation” convincingly rumbles in the spheres of murky death metal. At this point, the singer’s low grunts are put to their best use. ”Anesthetic Death” regularly crawls with creepy guitar picking, a welcome feature after all the constant firing. The last three tracks, starting with ”Burnt and Destroyed”, are the least convincing tracks of the bunch, kind of stuck in place and not providing anything the songs before them hadn’t delivered already.
The album leaves a lot better aftertaste than many its contenders, though I would still be wary to go over three stars. If the stagnancy in the latter part of the album was fixed (heck, you could just remove them all the way and so you would have an awesome 6-track whole that would fittingly end after ”Anesthetic Death”), Preemptive Strike could even be among my favourite war metal records. A well-done album, and I am looking forward to hearing more from these guys.
3 / 5
No comments:
Post a Comment