What Doesn't Kill You... sees New York's Candiria streamlining their sound a bit, but still retaining that aggressive & technical edge that have made them a force on the metal circuit over the last few years. On past releases, the band mixed in some serious jazz interludes as well as hip-hop & rap styles with their juggernaut technical metalcore sound. Here, many of those jazz injections have vanished, save for a few fleeting moments here and there, as if they saved it all for the closing fusion burner called "The Rutherford Experiment", which is perhaps one of the best metal/fusion tunes you will hear all year, complete with scorching guitar and keyboard work. The rap/hip-hop element rears its head on "9MM Solution", but otherwise the rest of this album is pretty catchy technical metal, with rousing chorus' and crunchy guitars, plus the solid vocals of Carley Coma, who goes from screams to melodic at the drop of a hat.
Tunes like "Dead Bury the Dead" and "Blood" will thrill even the staunchest of metal heads, while "Vacant" has plenty of complex guitar riffs and drum fills to please most prog-metal fans, or those into the technical metal of bands like Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan. While What Doesn't Kill You... is certainly enjoyable, it fails to come across as adventurous or ground breaking as albums like 300 Percent Density or The Process of Self-Development. You can't fault the band for wanting to reach out to a new audience a bit, but by losing a lot of their jazz & hip-hop sounds they are starting to sound too much like the multitude of other bands out there. I still can highly recommend this CD, but perhaps start with 300 Percent Density if you are new to the band and want an example of what they are fully capable of.
Track Listing
1. Dead Bury The Dead
2. The Nameless King
3. Blood
4. Remove Yourself
5. 1000 Points Of Light
6. Down
7. 9MM Solution
8. I Am
9. Vacant
10. The Rutherford Experiment
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