Sir, this is a Home Depot... I love Polish metal. I don't know what it is, but they seem to nail extreme metal with alarming consistency. Vader's newest may be mediocre but they've got like seven other classics preceding it, Mgla is on top of the black metal underground right now, Behemoth is Behemoth, Cultes des Ghoules, Lost Soul, Furia, Plaga... the list goes on seemingly forever. So coming across Dying Spirit here filled me with excitement, purely based on the promise of more ass kicking tech death from a European hotspot. And after a few listens... well, it's okay. I can give the band some serious props for the vocals being as beefy and menacing as they are, and the tone is very chunky and thick, and I love that, but overall this is lacking some serious bite. Really, "technical death metal" is a bit of a misnomer, since this is really much closer to the groovy side of death metal. Not like, say, Six Feet Under or something where they write three riffs and repeat them for 45 minutes. No, this is more like Godhate or a lesser Vader album like Necropolis or The Empire. There are a lot of rapid fire chugging patterns that work quite well when it comes to punching the listener in the face, but everything blurs together and makes the album pretty faceless by the time it's done. It's forty minutes of death metal mosh riffs, with some of them standing out superbly (like "Changes" or "The Game is Never Over"). And frankly, that's pretty cool, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. As excellent as these riffs are, there are too many that are too similar. The album really loses its luster after the first few tracks and it peters out without much consequence as a result. There's a great album in here in the vein of something like Vader with Pantera riffs, but the songwriting is still in the growing stages it seems. I'll be keeping my eye out for future releases but they'll really need to step their game up with the next one.
RATING - 69%
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