Band:	Incendiant
Album:	Incendiant
Style:	Death metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	2007

01. Night Of A Thousand Knives
02. Colliding Stars
03. Forever Echoing In Greed
04. Collapse Of The Light
05. Broken And Bowing
06. Ancient Chaos
07. Invoking The Flames

Incendiant is a brutal and technical death metal band and sadly, there is not much going for them to differentiate them from other Blast Olympics bands out there. This self titled record shows some potential and definitely doesn't qualify the band as pabulum; however, there is a long road ahead if they are to challenge Suffocation or Cryptopsy in any significant way.

Lets start with the good. As far as technical death metal goes, these guys go the extra mile and make sure that catchy song writing goes along with the usual hyper speed insanity and doesn't get buried behind the archetypal ADHD song structure of the style. Interesting guitar tones also help keep things moving, with my favorite example being the dissonant passages of "Broken And Bowing". This makes the music flow surprisingly well, managing not to bore even the most jaded of reviewers. At best, Incendiant sound like Suffocation with slightly less finesse.

Now for the bad. The drummer's kick drum work is sub par. I don't need to explain how important bass drums are for a technical death metal band, do I? Either way, throughout this record, it is clear that the bass drum is struggling to catch up with the speedy snare work. The murky vanilla production doesn't help matters much, and it could, since technical inadequacies could easily have been covered up.

And the ugly truth is that only real fanatics of this style will find any more use of this CD than as a Frisbee or handy mirror. The genre is over saturated and lets face it, fairly limited to begin with. If a band isn't absolutely superb, they don't have a chance on the radar. The bottom line is that Incendiant has plenty of potential but they haven't tapped enough of it on their debut to make heads turn. Considering most of their flaws can be overcome with a higher budget and practice, I see this as a sign of good things to come, as long as they learn from their mistakes.