review: Shards of Humanity

Shards of Humanity

Cold Logic

Unspeakable Axe Records

13 April 2020

Let’s unpack some of this SOH death metal.

1.SOH is shredding death metal. Solos, melodies, hooks, and hot licks are crucial. Whatever is happening in the song, they have instructed their guitarists to pull their own weight and live up to the job description. Do your job, guitarists; if not, you’re fired! Don’t come here with your “grooves” and your simpleton guitar playing. It takes the idea of the guitar hero and lets it run loose in headbanging, thrashing, song-centered death metal.

2.This is rock-based, and more specifically, thrash-based death metal, and not experimental nor tech-death nor jazz death metal. The guitars sometimes dive into pure shred territory and for a moment the listener might imagine Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page or Chuck Schuldiner soloing, but overall this is still song-focused music, with some specially designated areas for shredding. You can tell that the guitar players lock themselves down in the grandparents’ basement for hours and play along to Death albums and watch Ritchie Blackmore and Morbid Angel concert guitar solos on YouTube, but they also realize that the metal people want songs to rock.

3.The band seems like it is making an effort to be less computerized than a lot of contemporary metal. The drum sound is not as clicky and to fans who are unhappy with bands not doing their own playing, then this album would be more pleasing, although we would still like to see the evidence that the band played all this music for real. Show us the drummer doing the recording and let’s hear whether it is the real live drums from the studio. You know how metal fans are: “That sounds cool, but can you do it for real? Is it your real playing? Did you actually play that?”

4.The vocals are growled, in an aggressive, raw, harsh way, like a lot of the classic death metal. It is not cupped-microphone trickery nor monotonous, low, I-need-to--save-my-throat-from-pain growling. No, this is all-out vocal-chords-destroying harsh growling.

In short, if shredding thrashing death is your cup of tea, then this cup is hot, dead and ready.

unspeakableaxerecords.bandcamp.com/album/cold-logic