Disease Illusion
Backworld

I have to admit that the name of this italian band hardly can be described as appealing, rather appalling if anything. The cover art ain’t bad though, and you should never judge a book by its cover and neither should you judge a band by its name but names with disease in them are usually reserved for bad bands. This band is said to be dealing in the Gothenburg style death metal for most parts, and if you are trying to blame me for reviewing this album something like five months after its release, it isn’t my fault. I got the album in january, then my Apple products did what they could to prevent me getting a listen to this album as the iPod refused to import more than two tracks before I converted the files in the iTunes to AAC which is when the Pod finally decided to take in all tracks, this despite the fact that it already converts all music for the iPod into said format as a default, it is an idiotic machine sometimes and it set me back a fair bit of time for this review. But now I have heard this album many times and am ready to review it.

Musically we have been touching upon what it is, melodic death metal of a style similar to the gothenburg one, and add to that some metalcorish breakups and you have pretty much hit the nail on the head as to what expect from the band. It is very melodic and the only thing that is closing in on brutal is the singer who sounds quite evil I would say. Other than that there isn’t much in terms of the really brutal stuff, the guitars are very prominent and play loads of nice melodies. The sound is clean yet powerful without ending up feeling evil or brutal. Over the ten tracks on the album the variation is quite biggish, not overly so but there is some and the album plays for around fifty minutes.

I think that this is a good album and I was actually almost deciding for a higher rating at one stage but still went with a rating in the middle of our scale. This band does well in the guitar area, the melodies are often great and the vocals work alright as well, there are some niggles though, there is a small break in almost every song and that makes it somewhat predictable. And if there is something that I don’t really care much for it is predictability, I want things to surprise and open up new avenues and unfortunately that is not something that Disease Illusion do. They do death metal and they do it well, Predator and One Last Breath are really fine pieces of music for anyone who enjoys good music.

I think though in the end that this ends up being a good album that I probably will not reflect upon again now that I have finished reviewing it, the main letdown for this album is the predictability but one the other hand that is often a letdown for many albums and besides that little niggle it is a quite good album and no one can take it away from them that they have managed to come out with a very good debut album.