Band:	Devious
Album:	Domain
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	2007
A review by:	Herzebeth

01. Entrance...
02. Room 302
03. Incantation Of The Earthbound
04. Boundless Domain
05. Misanthropic Entities
06. Suoived Pt.II
07. The Repentance
08. Third World Suicide
09. Days Of Disorder
10. Dead Cannibal Civilization
11. Shibito
12. Lowest In The Foodchain

If an intro including a quote of Braveheart doesn't hint you about where this CD is going, then you are more lost than a 12 year old dude taking a quantum physics test?what sucks is that I blindly fell into the trap, and while I was thinking this would be a Doom/Folk album, the first song sucker-punched me and delivered Death Metal in a very brutal yet melodic form, so why did these guys decide to add a quote from a Mel Gibson movie? Damn it I don't know?

Anyway, this band gathers most of the Aborted elements and combines them with?well yeah! More Aborted elements, the patterns are not exactly the same though, some of the drumming and riffing sounds lined towards Thrash Metal instead of Death, that feature alone kept me interested to the very end for a while, but to tell you the truth, my mind focused on the similarities with the aforementioned band for the first couple of listens.

Once that bug died in my head, I started to fully enjoy the album; this is one of those albums that "grow" on you with each listen, and that's a feature which most bands lack of nowadays. The melodic approaches are actually very interesting and they suit perfectly with the intense structures within the album, the overall mix is quite good and the execution is almost flawless, the guys really know how to exploit their abilities and instruments in a very wicked yet interesting shape.

So what went wrong? The album is quite good, though it didn't break my neck to be honest. The songs are way too similar with each other and the vocals didn't sound as intense as the whole music did; technically "Domain" is a good album, and that's exactly why it earned all its points, Devious did their job, but that's about it.

The worse thing is the album truly lacks of a stand-out track?let me explain more, when an album has its highlights the listener will definitely replay it just for the sake of hearing those tunes, when an album hasn't any, the replay values drop to the ground. "Domain" falls into this thing exactly, they play their instruments astonishingly, but they didn't write something worth their technique you see?

Deity Down Records is a great label, I remember Vermin breaking my spine in 3 different places, Devious just broke my eardrums, I surely was waiting for something out of this planet.