Band:	Deadly Carnage
Album:	Sentiero II - Ceneri
Style:	Black metal, Atmospheric doom metal
Release date:	September 01, 2011
A review by:	X-Ray Rod

01. Guilt Of Discipline
02. Parallels
03. Epitaph Part I
04. Epitaph Part II
05. Growth And New Gods
06. Ceneri

So I was looking at my to-do-list (it's shamelessly short by the way) and I discovered there was an album I forgot to write about! So I took my promo copy of Deadly Carnage's sophomore album and I was ready for a session of Italian black/doom metal... Or not.

It was labelled that way when I got it but it feels misleading. What we have here is black metal of the melodic and varied kind. Featuring modern sound, acoustic/mellow moments with rocking tunes in between and just the right amount of melancholy scattered here and there to make it sound like it has a slice of doom on the mix while not really having it.

Their music is pretty tight. The riffs are catchy and aggressive but when the band wants to take the train to mellowville, they do so with a fair amount of good leads and acoustic guitars in the background. The transitions are smooth enough to not sound too forced, which can be heard in tracks such as "Parallels" and "Growth And New Gods", the later one having some very passionate leads in the second half that caught me off guard. Those moments are mainly the reason why some people who like their music with a touch of melancholy might be interested in this album, hence the "doom" tag it got.

While the transitions work in their songs, sometimes it doesn't work too well between the songs themselves and I'm specifically talking about the last track, "Ceneri". It's the longest one and it's mostly ambient, with keyboards and guitar leads on the background with clean singing (and a drum solo played with bare hands). Mind you that I'm not saying the song is bad but it just doesn't really fit with the rest of the songs, like if it was from another band. It seems like they were trying to figure out how to make the mood changes coherent but not really nailing it near the end.

This is just a minor problem though. Sentiero II - Ceneri is still a nice little album of around 40 minutes. Nothing mindblowing but definitely good for what it is. If tags like black, melodic, catchy, acoustic, ambient or even Mellowsville(?) caught your attention, make sure to put it in your list of 2011 albums you should check out.