Progressive, technical and melodic death-thrasing metal. Got that? Good. That is one way to summarise Amoral, the Helsinkian band celebrating its 10th anniversary, and also their third album “Reptile Ride”. But, you know, better not try to sum them up in neat little package in any of the myriad sub-genres of Metal.
When the CD got into my hands the cover got my attention because I suddenly realised that the crew of the flamed plane was Amoral themselves who had just delivered a nuclear strike in an imaginary town. Futuristic, the least I can say. The cd its self can be described as a “Nuclear strike”. Dropped ripping riffs, outchanding melodic leads, fast solos, technical drumming and a singer that makes you wanna kick somebody’s ass.
All this combined gives you Amoral’s new piece of technical death metal work. The cd opens with “Leave Your Dead Behind”, the song which is also filmed as a video clip and allready gets you into the spirit of what is going to come in the rest 41 minutes. Production is above average and in every single moment you can have every single aspect of “Reptile Ride” right at your speaker, where it belongs. The whole album is carrying the same feel through out the the songs allthough songs such as “Mute” might feel a lot more melodic and inspired from an other era and then again some other parts in the cd makes you wanna stand up and start breaking things. The vocals are being singed with a rather melodic or “chromatized” way and they are being combined very well with the riffwork something you do not hear a lot in this gehre of metal.
Also in the cd is included an Instrumental Apocalupsis which is called “Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Fun” and is inspired by Silver and Erkki as the very clever booklet informs us. The cd has everything a fan wants to hear. Final conclution is that Amoral have made a big step up and showed us great skills which are required in creating melodic death metal these days.
Vasilis “Sysfail”.