Monstrosity
Millennium

A lunar landscape on which some colorful dinosaur eggs rest, a mirror within which there is a bridge connecting the lunar desert to a beautiful blue sky dotted with clouds. The lunar sky, in contrast, is blood red. Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Or maybe not! This is death metal, damn it! There are two possibilities: either Monstrosity wanted to suggest that with their new album they would open a bridging connection to the bright future of extreme metal, evolving compared to other dinosaurs heading towards extinction, or they had no say in album illustrations. The second hypothesis is more likely: the cover is frankly pathetic.

Clothes don’t make the monk, but the cover makes death metal.
Fortunately, in this case, the well-known saying does not apply.

With a fortified and reinvigorated rhythm section, much more dynamic and on point compared to the debut Imperial Doom, and also on the verge of bidding farewell to the historic singer, the Tampa group composes a top-notch album, featuring the best Florida had expressed in the realm of macabre metal by then. George Corpsegrinder Fisher delights us with a superlative vocal performance before leaving the band to join Cannibal Corpse, the rest of the band is no less. With a thickened and lean towards brutal sound, dynamic and varied, Monstrosity publishes a compendium on American death metal of the time: sudden accelerations, neck-breaking decelerations, doomy and sulfurous atmospheres, blazing solos (impossible not to write it!), and martial rhythms worthy of the best Pete Sandoval. And then Fragments of Resolution, a truly unique case of a death metal ballad, also the best track of the bunch.

For all the decayed lovers of the genre, a must-retrieve, despite the colorful dinosaur eggs on the cover.