Reviews

I heard a little bit about this band before I received the CD and I wasn’t tremendously impressed.  I still had high hopes for the CD and I thought that this album was going to be a lot better then it ended up being.  The album is thirty-six minutes long - a total of ten songs - with an intro and an outro.  The band plays a mix of death metal and black metal with some thrash, which can always go together quite well.  Personally, for me, death metal can be amazing if done a certain way and downright horrible if done a different way, so it is very much hit or miss.  This is a miss for me.
 
The band has some good aspects. They play relentless and brutal metal, which is unquestionable.  Anyone who listens to metal will be able to recognize that these guys definitely understand the genre.  With that being said, the band has a lot of negative aspects, such as the fact that this CD sounds like one long song instead of ten different songs; there is no musical or structural diversity.  I think this happens when bands try too hard to be “metal” and really don’t diversify their sound.  Instead of a dynamic sound, what you get is basic, traditional death metal.  For a long time, death metal turned me off due to the more traditional sound of it with the same types of riffs and very low growling vocals.  When I started getting into bands like The Black Dahlia Murder and The Red Chord, my perception of the genre changed and I began appreciating the style more.  Today, you have bands infusing death metal into so many different types of music - hardcore, metalcore, and grindcore – and, for the most part, these bands sound fairly good, but At the Throne of Judgment doesn’t really offer anything new to me.  It just reminds me of all the horrible death metal bands that I have heard before, the ones that perform the same riffs, solos and vocals over and over again.  And the singer doesn’t do much for me either; he has a very good death metal low and a good black metal high scream, but that is it.  I really enjoy screamers who like to mix things up more and really show diversity in tone, pitch and style.
 
If you enjoy traditional death metal a lot, then this might be a band that you want to check out. But if you enjoy other forms of metal and hardcore as well, then I doubt you will like this band very much.  I originally thought this album was horrible and I couldn’t even get through a couple of songs without wanting to turn it off; my original rating was going to be 1 or 2 stars.  This is largely due to my high hopes.  After a few listens, it is starting to grow on me a bit, partially because I know what to expect from the album.  I really believe that this band has a lot of great ideas and some great talent, but I think that if they just tried to incorporate other things into their music, it would come together much better.  Lyrically, the band doesn’t offer much new either; the vocals come off very boring and indifferent.  The words aren’t as violent or gory as some death metal bands and they don’t offer a different perspective lyrically.  I had really high hopes for this band, but these guys just seem to be playing nothing new and exciting.