Killswitch Engage
Killswitch Engage

THE REVIEW

To be honest, these Killswitch Engage were destined to become the champions of the new generation hardcore. In fact, each member of the then quartet (which became a quintet following the release of "Alive or Just Breathing") came from renowned metal bands in the underground universe. Specifically, D'Antonio and Dutkiewicz were part (and still are after the reunion) of Overcast, from whose ashes, besides the already mentioned bassist and drummer of Killswitch Engage, the vocalist of Shadows Fall, Brian Fair, emerged.

For those accustomed to the Howard Jones era Killswitch Engage, which is from 2003 onwards, the album, stamped 2000, will almost seem like it was played by another band. The eponymous debut album indeed, in which there are many influences from the Swedish melodic death metal scene, features a very small amount of those melodic and/or tear-jerking choruses - almost absent, to be honest - that, starting from the next work, would be present in almost all the songs, especially in hitbreakers like "My Last Serenade and Fixation On The Darkness".

"Killswitch Engage," whose length does not exceed 32 minutes, immediately kicks off with the songs "Temple From The Within" and "Vide Infra", the most famous tracks of the work in question, reintroduced in the following album, which immediately display the characteristics of the entire CD: bone-crushing riffs by Stroetzel, pure hardcore screaming by the vocalist Jesse Leach, and extraordinary performance by the rhythmic duo Dutkiewicz-D'Antonio. A line of praise is truly deserved by the latter: the young bassist, with his powerful and hyper-fast picking, gives the songs that granitic sound which will become the trademark of the group. The third track, "Irreversal", deviates a bit from the first two, played at breakneck speed, precisely due to the presence of tempo changes and decelerations. The fourth track, "Rusted Embrace", is, in my opinion, the best of the album in question, along with "Temple From The Within", due to the stunning vocal performance of the surprising vocalist Jesse Leach. After the instrumental passage "Prelude" comes the trio "Soilborn"-"Numb Sickened Eyes"-"In The Unblind", the most aggressive songs of the Massachusetts quartet's work, placed just before the final "One Last Sunset", a melancholic instrumental - but which, truthfully, does not create much atmosphere - almost as if to create "the storm before the calm" (oh yes, quite unusual!). 

The album, engaging and well self-produced, sets the standards of the Killswitch Engage sound and lays the foundation for the subsequent masterpiece "Alive or Just Breathing". A must-have.