dEMOTIONAL
State in Denial

Silly name, was the first thing I thought when I got this album. And then noticed the cover artwork, it isn’t very attractive and I would actually call it uninteresting. As is the album name. State in Denial is not a name that invites, but it is the debut album of this Swedish group so they’ll get some slack on that one. The question more than how it looks is of course how it sounds and that can most likely only be better than the looks. But Metalcore or modern death metal, not really a genre that interest me anymore as it seems like everything in that genre is rather good but it all sounds the same and therefore is not that interesting. The same can be said about these guys as well.

It is music typical of the dual singer modern melodic death metal or metalcore, one man growls and the other guy sings cleanly. We have heard that before from many Swedish bands and these guys sounds no different, the vocalists are quite generic. The production is unsurprisingly very good, very polished and upbeat. No musical surprises is anywhere to be seen within the eleven tracks on this album, it is generic melodic death metal as it generally sounds these days. But it is a high quality performance on all hands of this bands but of course you could definitely define a problem in the originality of songwriting.

It is too good to be bad but it is too bad to be really good. The songs are unoriginal, maybe they lack ideas or maybe they lack courage to do something other than generic modern melodic death metal. The music is okay, no denying that but at the same time it feels like déjà vu and you could easily misinterpret this band for Sonic Syndicate, Scar Symmetry, Dead by April or any of the others similar Swedish modern melodic dual singer death metal bands, which are a lot. There is really no difference between all these bands, good to listen to but nothing thrilling as you have heard it all before. It is like watching a movie you have seen many times before.

No doubt it is a good album, but I wish that these bands stopped copying from the rulebook and went for their own thing. This is just a generic album of the genre, nothing new, nothing exciting and one can question why. Are they pleased to make music that sounds like everything else and that will drown in the competition? Are they too scared to dare venture outside the established paths? Are they just incapable of writing something that is outside the box? Good album but nothing that will be written into the history books.

HHHHHHH