Valkyrian Music

Arise in Chaos
Terminal Cognition
Released 15th July 2016
Groove Metal/American Heavy Metal
Released via EMP Label Group

‘Terminal Cognition’ is the second album from American groove metal band Arise in Chaos. The band was formed back in 2010 and they released their debut album ‘Civilization Decay’ two years later. This latest piece of work was co-produced by David Ellefson (Megadeth) and Ahrue Luster (ex-Machine Head, Ill Nino).

As soon as the opening track Nero starts blasting it’s way through the speakers, it’s clear that this is all about brutality and aggression. Everything from the thrashing guitars to the relentless pounding of the drums has that violent and hostile feel to them. The vocals, or more accurately growls, are fairly similar to the likes of DevilDriver and Lamb of God. Come to think of it, so is the overall style and structure of the music.

The Divine – the first single, acts as a good show-piece demonstrating all the things that you can expect to hear from these guys. It’s a ferocious beast of a song that reminded me of early Machine Head, only with more thrash and melodic death metal tones in the guitars. And the barrage of guitar riffs, shouting and pummeling drums doesn’t stop there. Oh no… It’s full steam ahead all the way for the rest of the album. Even the occasional melodic intro, such as the instrumental part at the start of Violent Colors, is barely enough for the listener to take a few deep breaths before aggressive growling and thrashing guitars. Reflections caught my attention due to the slightly slower pace and the toned-down thrash metal guitar parts towards the end of the song.

Overall, ‘Terminal Cognition’ is an album that I would happily recommend to fans of DevilDriver and Lamb of God. As far as the style and genre classifications go, it’s essentially a mixture of groove metal with the brutality and aggression of thrash metal and some melodic death metal. My only problem with it is that there’s lots of similar sounding bands out there and Arise In Chaos doesn’t really offer anything dramatically new.

3.5/5

Iza Raittila

This entry was posted on 11th May 2016 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags DevilDriver, Groove metal, Heavy Metal, Lamb Of God. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.