Band:	Tonic Breed
Album:	On The Brink Of Destruction
Style:	Groove thrash metal
Release date:	September 2010

01. Wait Is Over
02. Survive This
03. Lowball
04. Oblivion
05. Desperate Call
06. Don't Fail Again
07. On The Brink Of Destruction
08. Suit The Day
09. Death In Small Doses

So you've read enough of Doc Godin's reviews to know about one of the more serious issues amateur metal bands face. Good albums are sabotaged regularly by sleeper cell piece-of-shit vocalists. And it's a problem. A real problem, as your local elected official might put it. But I was skeptical of the scope of this real problem for a while. Goddamn Canadian alarmism, if you had asked me a week ago. But that all changed once I heard? this. This mess.

It's sad, really. Here's a band with a sizeable amount of talent. Tonic Breed knows how to write and perform thrash-imbued heavy metal, and they've clearly gone balls out for this release. The tunes here are catchy, aggressive, and groovy?

But the singing is none of the above. And that's because it sounds like torture (which might have something to do with that fact that it is torture). Maybe not car battery electricity to the nips torture, but definitely waterboarding torture. The flatness is smothering. Drowns out the good riffs.

I know blaming the singer for this would be dickish and all that; blame the fact that the production on this thing was done entirely by Tonic Breed themselves, right? That'd be kind. No can do, though. The production isn't half bad. The singer simply isn't a good at singing, and that's all there is to it. Otherwise masterful riffs are out-mastered by masterfully terrible singing. And not masterfully terrible in a punk rock, inebriated sort of way. Masterfully terrible in a boring and flat, masterfully terrible sort of way. Now I won't say that the dude should quit, but he definitely needs to do some style searching. Find a voice for his voice. What he's doing now not only doesn't work, it's hurting the band. Plain and simple.

So the guitar work here says mid to high 8. The singing yells mid to high 3. So I'm going with an N/A for this. Because all math is bad math with me. If you're tone deaf when it comes to singing (and only singing), this is definitely worth picking up. If not, well, it isn't.