Divine Heresy
Bleed the Fifth

"Bleed the Fifth" is an album that exceeds my expectations. In a musical landscape where everyone is revamping the Swedish death wave by modernizing it with hardcore elements, creating carbon copies of Dark Tranquillity, At The Gates, and company, finding a band that can stand out like Divine Heresy truly brings joy.

Just take a look at the lineup to realize that we are dealing with a band that knows very well the material they are dealing with: on guitar we find none other than ex-Fear Factory Dino Cazares, in excellent form here after the recent releases of the "mother" band where he had lost some of the sheen of the golden days. The rest of the lineup includes Tommy Vext on vocals (growl and scream), Joe Payne (bass), and Tim Yeung (drums).

The album, released at the end of August 2007, is a concentration of furious death metal corrupted by hardcore and explosive grind outbursts. Just listen to the opening one-two punch (the title track and "Failed Creation", the single from the album) to realize what our guys are made of. Extremely fast tempo changes, capable of varying the rhythmic structure and riffing, allowing them to break out of the usual "verse-chorus-verse" scheme in tracks that travel the canonical 3-4 minutes duration. The extremely high groove and the rubbery and distorted sound of Cazares' guitar, a true trademark of the guitarist, make the songs highly enjoyable and never boring.

The points of contact with Fear Factory are not many, except for the vocals (angry and growling in the verses, clean and melodic in the choruses, although the former is used more often) and indeed the riffing which goes hand in hand with the double bass drum. "Soul Decoded (Now and Forever)" could have easily come out of "Obsolete", just as one can't help but think of Machine Head's "Burn My Eyes" when listening to the finale of "Royal Blood Heresy", which strongly recalls "Davidian". For the rest, the instrumentation is reduced to the essentials: guitar-bass-drums, apart from some atmospheric touches in the intro of the aforementioned "Royal Blood Heresy" or the initial electronic effects of "This Threat Is Real".

The only limitation of the album is perhaps the songwriting, which is at times somewhat incomplete and quite indebted to big names like Meshuggah, Strapping Young Lad, as well as Fear Factory themselves, but apart from this, there are no significant tonal drops. "Bleed the Fifth" is an excellent modern death metal album that bodes well for the future, when they will be able to outline a more personal style. But for now, we can easily be satisfied.