Australian Christian Death metallers Scourged Flesh are back with their third full length album, ‘Welcome to the End of the World’. Yes that’s right. Christian death metal. So what? A lot seems to be made of religious leanings in the metal oeuvre, but it doesn’t matter if a band is Satanic, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the only religion we need to be concerned with is Metal. So, now that’s out the way, on with the music. The lads from Perth don’t seem to have had much exposure here for one reason or another (despite a nod to Noel and Julian from the Mighty Boosh in the ‘thank yous’), which is a shame, because this is pretty good stuff.

With a title like ‘Welcome To The End Of The World’, I was fully expecting a album chock full of references to the decline of modern morality, and how we’re all nasty sinners and we’re all going to be judged and so on and on; but instead it’s predominantly a mixture of natural disasters and terrorism. ‘Death and Destruction’, is Scourged Flesh’s comment on 9/11 and the aftermath, and very good it is too, the main riff oozing with Megadeth D.N.A., whilst Todd Kilgallon let’s the terrorists know in no uncertain terms that they are going to have their arses handed to them and then they are going to hell, a message he delivers in the style of Satyr. Nice! It’s nice to hear an old school solo as well, and Dan Holmes produces some groovy melodic licks with a Marty Friedman flavour. ‘War Machine’ is less impressive, coming across as unremarkable, apart from another great solo, but ‘Chains of Slavery’ has a real energy and purpose about it with some added touches of Bolt Thrower. The weak link here, as it is for a lot of the album, is Todd’s vocal performance. Whilst by no means bad, it’s best described as clunky, a lot of the time sounding as if he is struggling to make someone else’s lyrics fit a line in which they shouldn’t, and as such it sounds like someone singing karaoke who has realised that he’s not singing fast enough to match the illuminated letters on the screen.

‘Extinct’ comes across as a mix between early Bolt Thrower and a sort of Arch Enemy lite, and is one of the centrepieces of the album. It’s lyrically and vocally a bit stale though but is livened up with some mid song dicking around as the Todd mimics the widdly guitar riffs. It's all good fun but feels a bit out of place in a song dedicated to the foretelling of mankind’s doom and the coming of the Antichrist. Maybe it’s something Akercocke can consider on their next album… ‘Waves of Disaster’ is a rather predictable title for a song about a tsunami, but features some decent chugging riffs and a clean harmony over the death vocals that didn’t have me reaching for the skip button as they usually do. ‘Unleashed’, a song about a volcanic eruption, is something of a departure from the rest of the album. Whilst vocally it retains the straight ahead death style, it does have a shift of guitar focus to the more melodic end of the scale, with a juicy riff straight out of Queensryche’s Operation Mindcrime catalogue, and it is a welcome and refreshing lift to an album that could be a little bit predictable in places.

There’s a lot of things to like about Scourged Flesh, in particular Todd and Dan’s guitar work, which is always highly technical and invigorating, with a lot of classic 80’s and 90’s influences in there, as you don’t always get quite so much musical inventiveness in death metal these days, but there are problems with some scrappy vocal work and song structures, which for a new band would be entirely forgivable, but for a band on their third album, they should have all this ironed out by now and be fully into their stride. For the most part though, this is decent enough death metal, and well worth a blast.

http://www.myspace.com/scourgedflesh

Lee Kimber

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