Death By Design |The Trial Of A Species |Independent

"The Trial Of A Species" stages a courtroom after the end of mankind. Thirteen tracks serve as exhibits, testimony and judgment before an unknown tribunal, and as the case unfolds the true defendant surfaces: HumanOS, an artificial intelligence bred from human greed, social machinery and the endless chase for profit. The lyrics go after the right targets, and the courtroom concept ties the album together from the first charge to the closing "Verdict: Obsolete", where David Robin Sicher-Ford joins on guest vocals. Production stays in house, with Billy Lemasters assisting on post production. The guitars sit heavy and upfront, the bass wriggles through the low end with real intricacy, and the gutturals rumble from the bottom of the pit. The drums are programmed and the blasts hammer with machine precision and zero human swing, which makes a strange kind of sense on an album about a machine in the dock.

Musically, the album welds Dying Fetus groove to Archspire speed and dresses it in the doomsday cinema of Cattle Decapitation. The riffs chug, twist and detonate into blasts, the vocals swing from sewer gutturals to higher shrieks, and the orchestral and synth layers stretch the courtroom into something vast and cold. The formula holds and the brutality is genuine. Over thirteen tracks, though, the same moves keep coming back: the same stop and go chug, the same drop from blast into breakdown. Some exhibits blur into each other before the jury reaches "Verdict: Obsolete". At times the cinematic layers sit glued between the riffs like wallpaper, and the programmed kit robs the breakdowns of human sweat. None of that sinks the case. One man built a courthouse, filled it with Florida brutality and a brain, and passed a sentence that sticks.

|7.5