California's Mirror of Dead Faces are a fairly new band on the death/thrash metal scene, and Lamentations is their debut for Creator Destructor Records. Granted, Lamentations isn't the most original metal album you'll hear this year, as the band borrows big from the At the Gates school of melodic death metal, and they also sound a tad similar to The Black Dahlia Murder at times, but damn if they don't do what they do very well. Thankfully steering clear of the growl/emo style back and forth vocal attack (Ryan Thor has a pretty brutal selection of growls and screams here) and relying more on massive riffage and dual harmony lines rather than endless breakdowns that we too often see in the death-core genre, Mirror of Dead Faces offer up plenty of enjoyable extreme metal on this one, such as "The Horde of Swine", "Gauntlet of the Will", and the killer title track, all relentless examples of furious death metal firing on all cylinders. Though some of the tunes sound a bit too similar to each other, the overall intensity of the album as a whole can make you overlook that, and even if things are a bit short at just over 30 minutes, things flow well from start to finish, ending with a rather melancholy acoustic guitar instrumental "Plague of Sheol", wich is a nice touch after all the brutality. Definitely a band to watch in the upcoming months.
Track Listing
1 The Beginning of Sorrows
2 A Cripple Within
3 The Horde of Swine
4 This Is My Curse
5 Lamentation
6 Gauntlet of the Will
7 The Suffering
8 Bringer of Peace, the Lord of War
9 Plague of Sheol
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