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Whether you call it death metal, speed metal, thrash or just plain heavy metal, Living Sacrifice is certainly a rowdy excursion into the world of aggressive music. While thrash might be the best categorization of Living Sacrifice's music, it is probably a good idea to delineate some of the boundaries, blurred though they are, between the genres of aggressive music: death metal--growling, slow, dark vocals; speed metal--fast vocals with straight guitar and fast, inaudible lyrics; thrash--a hybrid or mixture of speed metal and death metal; heavy metal--the loud and aggressive mother of the above three genres now considered tame or even mellow in comparison to its offspring. One of the best aspects of this release is the poetic and simple-yet-intelligent lyrics. Like those of many other thrash bands, the lyrics are sped up and somewhat hard to understand, but the effort is worthwhile. "Darkened," the 8th track, illustrates this: Spiritual awakening,The band use three of the tracks, "Inhabit," "Mind Distant," and "Departure," to show they have an ear for more than distortion and rapid-fire note progressions. The short, melodic riffs are well conceived and help to add variety to the album. An unfortunate redundancy that weakens the album is two songs beginning with the same or a similar-sounding growl-far too obvious a repetition for even the most inattentive listener. The monotony of growly thrash vocals is bad enough, but a repeated growl is overkill. Although thrash is a genre with a relatively small following compared to the entirety of modern music genres, Living Sacrifice knows their genre and honors it with this album. Israel Kloss 1/30/2000
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