Review – Severed Fifth, Denied By Reign
I had originally planned to post the following review some five to six months ago, not long after the original release. For various reasons, all too boring to relate here, that never happened. I would however like to present it to you now….. just a tad late (…..sorry Jono).
Cover of Severed Fifth's 2008 album, Denied by Reign © Severed Fifth 2008- · Severed Fifth is a trademark of Jono Bacon.
Pinhead has just called, and he wants his flesh rending hooks back. And well he might, for Severed Fifth’s Denied By Reign is a riotous, razor sharp blast of metal goodness.
Severed Fifth is one man’s experiment, and propsed possible solution to the widely held idea that the major record labels are dinosuars flogging an outmoded and outdated business model.
The Denied By Reign album itself is available to directly from the Severed Fith website, and is made freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license. That means you can freely download and copy the album to your mates, just let ‘em know it was Severed Fifth/Jono Bacon wot done it.
The Severed Fifth project is the brainchild of one Jono Bacon, who explains the inspiration and impetus behind the project much better than I ever could.
Which quite neatly leaves me to talk about the music. Which, lets face it is the whole point of an album review, right?
From begining to end, this album doesn’t so much as lay out its manifesto, as repeatedly beat you around the head with a rolled-up copy, forcing you to sit up and take notice.
Denied by Reign rolls along at a frenetic pace. Forty minutes of relentless drumbeats, driving and slashing guitars that propel you along to an inevitably battered, bruised and bleeding conclusion that leaves you with a stupidly insane shit-eating grin on your face.
But, then that might just be me. What can I say, I just love this kind of grinding, driving and insistent music.
In Denied By Reign, Jono has crafted an unashamedly bombastic album that fuses several different styles of metal. Grindcore, melodic Death Metal, and Thrash/Speed are all present, with the vocals ranging from the guttural to the acid soaked. Jono even manages to throw some clean vocals into the mix for good measure as well.
I love this album. Period.
At this point, convention would have it that I should name some standout tracks. Truth is I can’t. I have spent hours going over the album, in the hope that I could present one or two tracks as my personal favourites. And after multiple spins, I still can’t.
So I’m just gonna say, download it, check it out, pass copies to your mates and spread the word. This shit rocks, big time.
The Review – Severed Fifth, Denied By Reign by apatheticlife.com, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.