2007-01-04
Ever seen one of those music video mash-ups? Ever wanted to know what a whole album of mesh-ups between styles would sound? If your greatest wish is to find an album that mixes heavy, thrash, melodic death and core then "A Chorus Of Obliteration" would be your holy grail.
This Tennessee quintet releases this debut back in late 2004 (on the indie label
Mono Vs. Stereo) and now, as some sort of preview to their upcoming second full length, Century Media kindly reissues it, as if there aren't enough Christian metalcore acts out there already…
Musically The Showdown build their songs in the same manner as
Into Eternity, just with different styles of metal (note that they DON'T play the same style nor have anything to do with prog metal, but still have some lines of similarity in terms of how the songs are structured), and severally suffer from the same problem the above mentioned Canadians have – sometimes the combination of genres just doesn't work, especially in the vocal department and in putting in various melody lines. Take "From the mouth of gath comes terror" for example – it stats with some fine thrashing, goes into crushing death grinds and suitable growls but is also accompanied by clean punk-rock/emocore vocals and some southern rock guitar riffing – it's just too much for the mind to process.
The Showdown, just like
3 Inches Of Blood or Into Eternity, can sound very unnatural to the average metalhead's ear; songs like "A moment encased in ash", "From the mouth of gath comes terror", "Iscariot" and "Your name is victory" may come off as a bit too un-distilled, not defined enough for the distortion loving pelts.
On some tracks ("Hell can't stop us now", "Epic: A chorus of obliteration", "A proclamation of evil's fate") this unfiltered combination manages to work better, to sound energizing and to be catchy enough to keep some riffs and melodies in your head a couple of minutes after you're done listening to the album. Other tracks ("Dagon undone (The Reckoning)", "Your name is defeat", "Give us this day") are more to the point, and really display the death and thrash metal these guys craft so professionally.
The main thing which bothers the used-to-metal ears so much are those clean vocals, which rarely go into more known ground of hardcore screams and ultimately only work well on one song ("Laid to rest"), however, all the growls (both high pitched death/thrash and low pitched death/black ones) are spot on.
They sound very professional, each part is well played and well written according to its genre, it's just that a sum of good things isn't always gonna be a good thing on it's own. The Showdown got the death & thrash nailed, they've got some great grooves, some golden southern leads – so why can't they decide on a genre? Or at least mix 'em well? No one likes a lumpy mixture.
Hope for this band may come with their next album "Temptation Come My Way", since some changes were made with the band (drummer Andrew Hall left to be a pro wrestler and they announced the genre it's gonna be in is southern rock), but until then this is recommended only for those looking for pseudo-innovation through genre mix.
Ofer Vayner
