Artist: Rafflesia
Title: In the Face of Suffering
Type: Album
Label: Genet Records

The first thing I have to say here is that to get the best out of this album, I had to get away from the idea that “In the Face of Suffering” sounds like every modern metal/metalcore album you’ve ever heard. That’s quite hard to do. Over the course of its 10 tracks, it does seem to cover every facet of this genre. We’re helpfully told that the comparison base is Heaven Shall Burn, The Black Dahlia Murder, Unearth and Aborted. I would add to that list Killswitch Engage, whose riffs seem to be taken off the shelf on “New Dawn Rising” and elsewhere on the album, but would question Aborted. Sure, this is based on death metal but it’s not as dark and heavy as that of their Belgian counterparts.

Nevertheless this is a collection of decent and powerful songs. The riffs are melodic, engaging and crisply delivered. There’s always plenty happening and there’s no let up. The album starts well with “The Dead Tell No Tale”. The thundering drum dictates the pace which runs up and down but has an element of New York hardcore about it. By contrast “Bow Down” has a more melodic death metal riff, with whirlwind guitar and drum work. “Axiom” contains more melodic guitar work. It’s quite technical, the drums style and again there’s an element of hardcore. Throughout “In the Face of Suffering” there’s good energy and changes of ambience, but I didn’t find it exciting in the way that Heaven Shall Burn can be. As a result a number of the tracks are nondescript. “New Dawn Rising” breaks this mould with a mechanical rhythm pumped out from the drum and the sense of an onward rhythm but we’re soon back to the technical melo-rhythm to which we’ve become accustomed. “Misery and Pain” – even the track titles are rather clichéd – is a better track and has more depth but I felt that the guitar section at the end could have developed into something special. It didn’t and again the final track “Unvanquished” doesn’t quite deliver its potential. It’s the same sort of thing as before, a bit heavier and harder maybe, but it turns into a decent, catchy song. Sadly it fails to reach the climax as you might expect of the last track, and that’s the problem with the album as a whole.

An album doesn’t have to be original to be good, and in this respect Rafflesia’s desire to play a common style is absolutely fine. It’s energetic and technically sound but sadly I couldn’t sense any progress by the end. Instead of branching out and developing new ideas and creating something really interesting to add to the familiar metalcore mix, the band seem frightened to deviate too much from the same path and for me, that made “In the Face of Suffering” slightly disappointing.

http://www.myspace.com/rafflesiametalcore
http://www.genetrecords.com