It must be a very good and proud feeling for a band to have finished their first full-length. With the decline in record-sales there are more self releases and Posthuman has chosen to do this as well. The band started in 2007 and after one demo and some live appearances 'Rise from Ruins' is now a fact.

After the first spin, I didn't know what to think about it, was it good, bad or average? After the intro with spoken words in several languages, "A Planets Lament" is the opening song. The song starts as a real death-metal song with grunts, but after a minute the clean vocals are introduced. Especially the clean singing is a bit doubtful, it sounds a bit weird, like they tried to give it a kind of static sound to compensate for the average singing capacity. Anyway, that is the only thing about this record I really have to bitch about. The third song has deep and low grunts and the band uses electronic keyboard sounds in their music. Fortunately the keys stay rather in the background, but enough up-front in several songs to give them a twist of its own.

You can hear that the band is influenced by several modern death combos like In Flames, Killswitch Engage, Soilwork, Scar Symmetry and probably more. Just listen to the opening riffs of "Darkest Lies" and you think you already know the song, but that isn't a problem at all. The grunts of Sander Stegeman sometimes sound a bit like those of Gorefest's frontman Chris; they can be understood very well. "The Meaning of Death" is my favourite song, it has power, it is very aggressive and the clean singing part fits in the song. Next to the keyboard-parts there are several songs with good and crackling guitar solos.

A nice thing to mention is the use of a 17-headed grunt choir in the song "Ashes to Ashes", although I have to say that I expected more from that.

Recapitulating:
Song writing: 80
Guitar solos: 80
Clean singing: 60
Grunting: 85
Keyboard parts: 75
Originality: 70
Lyrics: 75

The band is serious in everything they do, including the lyrical themes, and to end with one of their own statements: "The future starts today".