INFERNAEON

It was the fertile swamplands of southern Florida that spawned, among scads of other bands, the groundbreaking NOCTURNUS in the late 1980s. Their use of a full-time keyboardist was controversial at the time, when the instrument was considered a crutch of the sappiest of the hair-farmer acts. Now, of course, a thousand black metal groups have legitimized keyboards as a tool for atmospherics, and their use scarcely raises an eyebrow.

It's still kinda rare to see a flat-out death metal band utilizing them the way NOCTURNUS did, though — which makes fellow Floridians INFERNAEON their spiritual descendants as well as their geographic kin. The keyboard trades off the spotlight with the guitars, sometimes providing a simple and overarching texture and sometimes carrying the melody of the song. The results are a mix of a tougher, very stripped down and vicious American death metal with a more symphonic European black metal-derived grandeur. Combined with a theatrical visual stage show, the results are fairly bombastic and elaborate.

Fear not, though — with two ex-members of MONSTROSITY in the band, you know these guys can throw down some unrelenting death metal when the occasion calls for it. Blasts abound, and the riffing and soloing are particularly awesome here — plenty of pit-inciting midtempo sections with shredding leads over them. The keyboards are part of the music, never just draped on as superfluous window dressing or used to add frills to boring parts. Vocalist Brian Werner tops it all off with an aggressive performance heavy on long, sustained screams (one tops forty seconds in length, allegedly without the aid of studio tricks).

It would be a stretch to call INFERNAEON technical, but their instrumental prowess can't be denied – there's a lot going on in the riffs, but the band has enough sense of dynamics to never let things get bogged down in too many notes or needlessly oppressive overkill in the name of brutality. Check out the way the final song is put together for ample proof of this – alternating between simple, neck-snapping thrash riffing, black metal frenzy, and chunky midtempo riffing, it's a few minutes of perfectly-constructed extreme metal, catchy without pandering, instrumentally impressive without being flashy or showy.

It's not an insult to say that this record, minus the punchy modern production, could have come out in the early-to-mid 1990s. Its influences are proudly and defiantly of an older school – this isn't hardcore dressed up in a CANNIBAL CORPSE t-shirt, this is music from a time when the most savage death metal acts still retained a bit of personality and flair, before the scene became glutted with third-rate imitators. INFERNAEON are an interesting mix of old influences dragged bleeding into the light of a new day, and with this as their debut, they stand poised to make one helluva mark on a scene that may not realize how much it needs them.

P.S. Don't let the track listing fool you; the album's a short but respectable 31 minutes.