Dehuman

This debut from Belgium's Dehuman is one intense listen. The band take the swampy, sludgy sounds of early '90s Obituary and the technical death metal proficiency of mid-'90s Death to create a sound that's equal parts impressive and oppressive, head-bangingly familiar and mind-numbingly unoriginal. Your enjoyment depends on where you stand in regards to death metal. If you're a diehard who loves it all, you'll find nothing wrong with this. If you crave even a modicum of originality, you're going to want to go elsewhere. A great deal of death metal fans fall into the former category though: as long as it grinds and grooves, and opens caskets and does horrible things and all that jazz, it's all good. And, man, when a band are as talented and solid as Dehuman, it's almost all good. But until they manage to up the originality a bit and get a bit of a better grasp on adding in some space to breathe in the music (if that's something they're even interested in, which I kind of doubt), it's one for death metal diehards only.