Band:	Amok
Album:	Lullabies Of Silence
Style:	Technical death metal
Release date:	April 2006

01. Lullaby Of Silence
02. Fortress
03. Sip Of Thorns
04. Jailed In Mind
05. Internal Void
06. Shattered Honor
07. Rynch
08. Lady Addiction
09. Screams Noises
10. A Life With No One

Cephalic Carnage, old Dillinger Escape Plan, Ion Dissonance, Crowpath - these are the bands that I am reminded of when listening to Amok. Unfortunately, although the band's assault on the senses can be quite impressive at times, there are still a lot of areas that could have been improved for Lullabies Of Silence to be a real classic death/grind release.

First, let me mention what is good about Amok. They have a great bassist, who is unusual for this style of music. He utilizes jazz and improvisational techniques and generally does more on the fret board than most grindcore bassists would. The band's absolutely insane drummer is similarly competent and inhumanly fast. The band's music gains a lot thanks to this. There are a lot of elements of improvisation stuck in between the absolutely crazy blasts and chaotic breakdowns. The music is extremely brutal all the time, up to it becoming a fault and the album becoming almost unlistenable. Naturally, there are people out there who dig this sort of thing but unfortunately, I am not one of them. With brutality the band rather unsuccessfully tries to cover up their lack of dynamic songwriting. Its all a wall of blasting noise that never lets go and in the long run, this kind of approach can be quite boring. To make matters worse, the production here is pretty mediocre and not very clear. All of this makes this release even harder to really enjoy, unless all that we are looking for is impressive speed and technicality.

Is this album worth the kind of effort required to sit through it enough times to recognize and tell the difference between songs? Not really, we already have more immediately accessible death metal albums out there this year.