Relinquish the Throne

18 minutes, 8 songs.  Relinquish the Throne sure goes by quickly.  Too quickly - both at the song and album level.  The good news is that it's its biggest problem.  Abdicate hail from Rochester, New York and as one might expect, "New York Death Metal" is what they're about, and they do a pretty good job.  I'm reminded a bit of Incantation, even though I haven't heard that band in a while - there's that little something that's similar, a clean but somewhat brutal, crushing sound.  Relinquish the Throne is mostly slow to mid-paced, and even the faster passages sound a little slow compared to the high-speed playing sometimes found in Death Metal.  A somewhat "terrorizing", but subtle atmosphere meets a menacing, heavy, poundering sound that will make you feel like you're being trampled by a horde of zombies or whatever "scary" horror characters you can think of.  But as I mentioned earlier, this all goes by very quickly, so you survive the onslaught and keep asking for more.

Guttural vocals are of course the norm here, although they're not of the "puking-your-breakfast" variety, and often sound rather razor-sharp for growls.  Like their contemporaries in the NYDM scene, chaos meets technicality, so we're spared the sloppy playing and instead treated to some precise yet face-ripping guitar shredding - nothing too "catchy" save for a song or two.  Abdicate are another band that have elected not to drown us in blast beats, much to this scribe's pleasure.  Now could we get something a little longer next time?  For now, this is a good teaser for fans of the genre.