I went through a brief phase back in 2013 or so where I was the biggest Battlecross fan on the planet for like six and a half minutes. Around that time there was a minor groundswell of bands just like them that blended thrash with melodeath in a way that hadn't really been commercially successful since the heyday of The Haunted a decade prior, and they all suffered the exact same problem: They had a ton of energy and threw tons of riffs at you but precisely none of them would ever stick. It's pure "in one ear and out the other" metal, and it got so bad that Battlecross is literally the only band like this that I can remember six years later (after typing that I checked the Similar Artists tab on MA and saw that I voted them as similar to Revocation, a band I made this exact point about last year and now I can't stop laughing at how correct I was).
Obviously I bring that up because Burn Down Eden is similar to the Battlecross type of metal in many respects, but it's not a 1:1 comparison. The Americans tend to lean harder into the thrash side of the equation, while the Germans here have one foot and three toes planted on the melodeath side, and as such they tend to focus a bit more on hooks and lead lines than riffs themselves. That may rob them of some meaty intensity, but it gives them a clear advantage in terms of memorability.
Liberticidal's bread and butter is a sort of The Black Dahlia Murder-esque high speed melodeath with technically impressive solos that don't do much to excite people who aren't automatically wowed by sweeping arpeggios. I also hear a lot of hints of Wintersun in here in the lead guitar department (from the self titled era of course, his is quite free from the excessive bombast that cripples Jari with such alarming frequency), and I've always tended to like bands that take a lot of influence from Wintersun a hell of a lot more than Wintersun themselves (like Brymir and Aephanemer) so you'd think that'd be a good sign.. Just like with the Battlecross type bands, when this is on, it's breathtaking and exciting, but as soon as it's over it feels like you barely listened to anything at all. The parts that stick out are usually thanks to sheer repetition. That lead lick in "Grotesque Satisfaction" just goes on and on and on and I swear the song felt twice as long just because I heard that fucking "widdlywiddlyWEE" part a hundred times.
Honestly, their real crime is simply not doing much to keep the album exciting. Nearly every track on Liberticidal runs for a similar length of time, and that's almost always a clue that the songs themselves are going to be workmanlike and samey. This is no exception, though they're a lot busier than most songs on albums of this nature. The sheer number of solos and flashy leads should turn this into a colorful dynamo but instead it all fades into this kind of Dime Store Children of Bodom mush and winds up being totally inconsequential. Hell, I'm not even kidding when I say that the main riff of "Eternal Youth" is so similar to the one in "Dystopic Endzeit Panorama" that I genuinely thought it was just a bridge riff at first and had no idea the tracks changed. With the heavy focus on melodies and lead guitar, you'd think that would naturally be Burn Down Eden's strength, but it's really not. All of that stuff is surface flash, a quick woosh of fire that dazzles for a few seconds and fades just as quickly. No, their real strength is in the sections where they just buckle down and riff out something really god damned mean while the drums start blasting away. "Eternal Youth" and "Dammerung" are best for this and are easily the best tracks on the record.
I started writing this with a much higher opinion of the album than when I finished, which is pretty emblematic of the entire problem with this particular subset of metal in the first place. On the surface, this is an impressive and ear catching, but after a few minutes fades you realize that your ear wasn't caught as much as it was swatted lightly.
RATING: 40%
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