The fun thing about Metal is that we all have our guilty pleasures. I guess this could be said about music in general, but it seems to be more true with Metal than anything else. Perhaps it is because many of us are very particular about what we love and hate about it, and many of the fans opinions and loyalties that side with certain bands often are easily perturbed by the slightest things.

With this album, for myself at least, it’s as if many of my favorite guilty pleasures game together and decided to make an album. Guilty pleasures being my root love for Gothenburg style melodic death / thrash guitars. Growly vocals with the occasional melodic verse sung clean with over production, or copious amounts of double bass thumping and tom fills behind the drum kit. While this album isn’t amazing by any means, it’s very easy to rock to without feeling like I’m being insulted by its formulaic simplicity or traditional song writing. I’m generally a sucker for long, progressive songs at heart, and this album has anything but that, and that’s okay.

Influences range from bands such as The Crown, Pantera, and Lamb of God to Soilwork, Dark Tranquillity, and of course In Flames. While the Gothenburg melodies are certainly there, this album actually is quite a bit more chunkier, and not bogged down with overly catchy hooks (I’m looking at you, Lamb of God), or filled with a large amount of melodic bridges and dueling guitar solos (I’m looking at you, In Flames). The nice blend of chunkiness this album offers among the rest of the assorted variety of styles is able to help this album distance its self quite a bit from being lumped into a generic copy cat of any of the aforementioned bands.

Our young vocalist has himself quite a range as well, which is actually one of my favorite parts about this album. Low guttural screams which almost hit a tone that could be filed under “Grind”, but wild ranges flying above that as well, keeping things interesting. In this style of Metal, it can be really frustrating for me when the vocalist has only one dimension of screams/growls, and I can find myself growing quickly annoyed by them. However this album defies that rather admirably. On top of that the clean singing, with what seems to have a little help from Pro Tools, can be a nice breath of fresh air for various choruses, although they aren’t strewn into each song predictably.

One of the other things I enjoy about this album is that the production value has a few nice surprises in store for the listener. One that I find notably awesome is how the end of track 4, “Deathride to Escape” fades out in somewhat of a muffled tone. It’s done very simply and tastefully, but accentuates the song quite nicely. With Metal, I generally prefer the “dirty” or even “4-track” sound of production. It almost always adds to the overall atmosphere or “grimness” of an album, if you will. With this album, the pristine production actually seems to help it along in a way. While it isn’t horribly over produced like Dissection’s last album, or the past few In Flames efforts, one can tell with some objective listening that the production and final mastering of this album was carefully picked over. Each instrument is mixed in perfectly, nothing too loud, and not much of it lost in the chaos. If I could change one thing about the production, I would have made the cymbals and crashes a bit louder, but that’s about it.

All in all, this album is a good listen. By no means ground breaking or astoundingly different or experimental however. It was never meant to be, and I’m quite okay with that. Just good to put on and ignore, or to rock to a few times. I’ll definitely look forward to Submission’s next release, hoping they might be able to branch out from their roots and take the talent they have and run with it.