Every few months I receive an album in a mail by a band who I’ve never heard before and upon listening to the effort I find myself being undecided as to what my opinion of the music truly is. This is the case with the newest mCD by Swiss technical death metallers Amok, I’ve listened to their latest album a few times over the past few months, and I’m still not sure if I like it or not. Hephaistos contains four tracks and clocks in at just under 16 minutes. The music is a combination of different styles with obvious influences including the likes of Nile, Kataklysm, Immolation, Death, Gorguts and Cryptopsy.

While the combined elements of the group are solid and show a lot of promise, the song writing itself is rather lacklustre. This is just one of those albums with a lot of technical wankery being tossed around while lacking any real substance musically.

The riffing of Phillipe Suarez is impressive as he puts on a clinic of technical death metal guitar playing throughout the four tracks, and the bass lines of Wladislas Marian add depth to the overall sound. The drumming performance of Edward Hay is solid, but nothing spectacular enough to be worth gushing over. One of the weaker aspects of the group is the vocals of Ugo Rodriguez who uses a slightly shifted shriek throughout the majority of the material which is often just really irritating and weak and distracts from the music at times.

The songs are each around 4 minutes in length and tend to remain at a mid-high paced speed, however, none of the tracks really seem to lead anywhere and don’t really bring any emotion out of my while listening to the material apart from maybe the occasional yawn mixed with a nod of approval from time to time.

The material itself isn’t horrible by any stretch, but by the same token, it doesn’t do anything for me. It’s like watching Norm Abram build a chair on The New Yankee Workshop; it’s interesting to watch him build it together, but you never get a feeling of "FUCK YEA! THIS IS THE MOST AWESOME THING IN THE WORLD!" it’s just a sense of "This is cool… but I could just as easily be spending this time watching porn and jerking off."

Switzerland’s Amok definitely showcase their skills on Hephaistos and prove that they have what it takes to play technical death metal, however, they still need to work on the writing aspect and, most importantly, writing music that is actually entertaining. Not a bad effort, I’m interested to see where they go from here.

Written By: Teufel