DIVINITY

The debut album from this Canadian band seems to incorporate every ingredient necessary for a successful result: thrash-style straight guitar passages, beautiful solos, tight rhythm section work, the fury of death metal growls, stern melodies, a polished modern sound, metalcore-adjacent vocal touches, and high-quality performance and production. But just ask yourself: if you simply take condensed milk, jam, chocolate, caramel, and cookies and mix it all together, will it taste good? Obviously, this "dish" will be sweet, but refined — hardly. I suggest approaching the Canadians' work in exactly this way. The guys wanted to take the best from Strapping Young Lad and Soilwork, but the result turned out to be merely an arithmetic average, almost entirely lacking its own identity or distinctive character. I believe that finding that identity is precisely DIVINITY's main task for the near future. And there is no reason to doubt that they have a future (at least in the near term), since this kind of material is in decent demand among both labels and listeners right now.