KILL THE ROMANCE

On "Take Another Life", Finland's KILL THE ROMANCE offers up ripping and melodic modern thrash with usually well done clean vocals that owe more to SOILWORK than the typical 'core thrash band. With searing guitar lines and forceful, up-tempo arrangements the musical effect throughout is quite strong, but halfway through the disc begins to get a little too formulaic.

"Take Another Life" is nothing if not consistent. The up side is that each of these 11 tracks is fairly strong and offers some awfully molten guitar work. There not a lot to complain about here and even the most fickle fans would have to applaud the band for its array of hot riffs and hard-charging arrangements. As one works his way through tracks like "I'm Alive", "Prey", and "Ghost White Coma", the head banging factor is kept high, while the fairly catchy clean vocals choruses aren't overly slick, but do take the edge off the heavier sections a bit. As one continues through the remaining tracks, the formula becomes all too familiar. Any one song considered on its own gets points for the savageness and decent melodies. The problem is that each song sticks so closely to that format as to become almost indistinguishable from the others, at least as far as the choruses are concerned. Fortunately, the numerous moments of riff crush and searing leads offset at least some of the chorus monotony.

So that leaves me thinking that there is a lot to like on "Take Another Life", but once you've heard a handful of songs, you've basically got the gist of the album. None of this should be construed as a slight on the band's overall delivery, as it is rather convincing. I'd just like to see KILL THE ROMANCE stray from the formula a bit more and change things up here and there. On the whole, "Take Another Life" would be a worthwhile purchase, provided you realize that the album will not stand out from the pack.