This is death metal. No, wait! Melodic death metal. No, hang on; it has an element of sludge too. And now it sounds like Amon Amarth. Now it's thrash. But that solo sounds like a hardrock solo from the eighties. And this bit! This bit is really proggy!
Well, as you can gather from my initial rant here, I've had a bit of a trip with Australians Hammer Persuasion. Are they the Mastodon of death metal? Something like that, I reckon. So if you combine all of the above with a touch of Rush and brutal vocals, you pretty much get the picture (?). Thing is, that I don't quite get the picture. As I've said before, I'm probably conservative and old-fashioned and what not, but I have a hard time following Hammer Persuasion's vision. There are really, really cool passages on 'Necropsy of the Human Mind', like for example the intro to Held Within, but I loose track of where the Australian five-piece are heading. The sixth and seventh tracks, Limbo and Angel kind of reboost the album - which by time is needed, because somewhere during the course of the fourth track, Immaculate Degenerate, my attention goes amiss entirely. But thing is that I've sort of lost the attention again somewhere between track 8 and 9 and the rest of the album.
Much of the reason for this is not just fact the this to me isn't a whole and fully forged album in the old-fashioned sense, it's also because the vocals, despite being shared by both bass player Andrew, drummer Joseph and one of the guitarists, Gerard, the vocal performance offers next to no diversity and rather becomes one, long and very monotonous shout. When you consider how much variation the music offers, I'd actually expect a lot more experimentation when it comes to vocals. The addition of clean vocals would have been natural in my ears, for some parts of this album.
Conclusion: I believe this band has a lot to offer the world of metal, but the jewel needs a considerable amount of polishing before they're ready to conquer the globe.
