TRENDKILL

There's a refreshing directness to TRENDKILL. Swedish they may be, but they don't fuck around with any real genre-specific clichés in the name of fitting in with a scene. They pretty much just strip things down to the most basic building blocks, riff like mad, scream a lot, and generate scads of forward momentum. And what's wrong with that?

There's blasting, muscular riffing, the odd start-stop chunkiness (you know, just enough to fire up a bunch of inaccurate comparisons to MESHUGGAH),and just enough moments of slithering tempos and melodic guitar to leaven the brick-simple aggression on display at all other times. They do bring some diversity in tempo, which saves them from monotony — you get plenty of songs with slow crushing parts that end up careening into cascading blast beats.

While "No Longer Buried" is satisfying on a basic level, it's perhaps a little too generic — the songs are solid but lack memorable parts, and the whole thing ends up seeming a little less than the sum of its parts. A lot of textbook metal greatness is put together here, but it lacks the personality to really put it over, or hold the listener's attention.

For a debut album, this definitely isn't bad, and TRENDKILL are well worth watching. If you're into the straight-ahead aggression of the most basic elements of MACHINE HEAD or mid-'90s SEPULTURA, combined with maybe a littleMESHUGGAH, give these guys a listen. Don't expect them to blow you away with innovation or originality, but for delivering some solid, satisfying metal, they'll do quite nicely. (Too bad they ditched their original name, AGGRESSIVE SERPENT, which was as awful as their current moniker but at least had the added benefit of being funny as hell.)