Band:	Darkness By Oath
Album:	Near Death Experience
Style:	Melodic death metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	March 2012

01. Into The Gloom...
02. In An Obscure Eternity
03. Viole(n)t Intentions
04. N.D.E.
05. A Cry Of Terror (Voices From Nowhere)
06. Holloworld
07. Steams Of Blood
08. Unequivocal Evil Excitement
09. Fallen Angel Of Death
10. Last Emotion
11. Terror In Thousand Faces

My teef hurt and I'm probably going into a diabetic coma. It's what happens when you eat nothing but white bread with a heap of sugar on it. Wait...That didn't actually happen, I just listened to Near Death Experience in it's entirety is all.

Dan Swanö apparently really digs these guys. That was once a really good sign; after all, his endorsement probably helped expose a lot of us to Hail Of Bullets, which turned out really nicely, but it seems recently he's giving the thumbs up to some of the most boring death metal bands around. Darkness By Oath is a continuation of this trend. Essentially, this music is dry, copy + paste modern death metal; you know the type; seamless, pristine, crisp, with a tighter sense of time than most Rolex's, and also completely soulless. Soulless in a boring, uninteresting way, not the cool, evil, menacing sort of way.

Well, seems D.B.O. realized just how boring their music actually was, because each song seems to revolve entirely around a melody or two which feel like slapped-on afterthoughts. It's a rock and a hard place listening to this album; on one hand, you've got these juvenile melodies which kill the death metal feel, and accentuate just how generic the rest of the music is, yet when these melodies are absent, the bore-factor is about as ignorable as a railroad spike to the back of the skull.

In many ways, Darkness By Oath really has a sort of Children Of Bodom quality to them; using sugary sweet melodies, which, if slowed down and translated into less aggressive surroundings, would make halfway decent fastfood jingles as a compensation for their otherwise thoroughly un-dynamic songs. This should make them immensely popular in some circles. Granted, these riffs are incredibly catchy, which is probably the one redeeming (even if eventually irritating) quality of Near Death Experience - hell, these melodies almost make this album damn near enjoyable sometimes. Perhaps a less misleading title would have been Nearly A Death Metal Experience.

A huge recommendation for wussbags who can't handle death metal but want to say they listen to death metal.