Band:	Lay Down Rotten
Album:	Mask Of Malice
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	February 24, 2012
A review by:	Doc G.

01. Death-Chain
02. A Darker Shade Of Hatred
03. Nightfall
04. Mask Of Malice
05. ... And Out Come The Wolves
06. Swallow The Bitterness
07. Hades Resurrected
08. The Devil Grins
09. La Serpenta Canta
10. The Loss

You've heard this album before. Done a dozen times from a dozen different bands. It's nothing new. In fact, it's downright generic throughout a lot of it...Yet, Mask Of Malice is actually incredibly solid in spite of all these things.

I've been through this a handful times over the last couple months - how to explain a really straightforward death metal album? Not exactly the easiest thing to do repeatedly and still make it sound fresh. Well, there's two types of these typical death metal bands; the ones that stick out and have personality, or the ones that are happy to sit lazily in with the other boring, predictable acts. In other words; the ones that don't suck, and the one's that suck. Luckily, Lay Down Rotten are on the "don't suck" side of things. They've managed to find a nice medium between being aggressive and being catchy. This is not a melodeath album by any means, but the riffs have that hook that grabs you as if it were. Ok, scratch that, there are a few melodeath-ish moments shown most prominently in the leads, but not nearly enough to consider Mask Of Malice a melodeath album by any stretch.

You've read this part before many, many times. This has been done before. Lay Down Rotten execute this heavy, polished form of death metal extremely well, but it doesn't detract from the fact that what they are doing so well has, in fact, been done many times before.

Mask Of Malice is an album that once again isn't really much of an achievement in terms of creativity, but still works well inside the box.