Guilty As Sin - Led To The Slaughter

2010-04-16

First, I would like to give these guys some credit. There are not a lot of bands that are willing to release a heavy metal album without any vocals on it and a few lead guitar solos. It's a risky task to put out an album like that, especially today, when the credits are looking for a familiar format they can rely on.

Guilty As Sin plays old school thrash/death metal; a style somewhere in between Metal Church, Kreator and old Morbid Angel. The music is great, but that's where it stops as far as I can tell. You can't go forward with that. This album can easily be dubbed into a 3D shooting computer game, but I don't see myself listening to it on a regular basis. It was even hard for me the listen to the whole thing for the second time, even though they are playing the music that I like. Without any vocals and lacking guitar solos, it all sounds like a never-ending song. In contrast to everything else, the last song on the album, International Selection, totally surprised me. It's a wired mix of Egyptian or Arabic music. No distortions are involved in this one. Really strange….

More credits to the band on their cool album cover, a picture in which the pope is leading a crowd of ships to their death, a nice metaphor for an anti Christian band (don't get me wrong, I'm not against Christians or anything, I just like the way they presented it).

If only there was some gut-screaming lead singer, even in just a few songs on this album. It could easily get the "classic album" tag, because the whole sound and atmosphere is totally underground metal from the 80's. If you take a quick look into the MySpace page of "Guilty As Sin", you'll see that they are not on that path. The trio that formed the band in Boston back in 2008 is not even looking for a lead singer. They love what they are doing. Like I said, those guys in Boston have some balls!

Dolev Zaharony