Completely unfamiliar with the band coming in, I was advised before doing this review to do a little research regarding France’s Destinity, as it seems they’ve gone through some sort of direction change since their inception in the mid 90’s. After digging around at their website and Myspace, as well as their page at metal-archives.com, they started life as a black metal band, but have been consistently evolving from release to release. 2004’s In Excelsis Dementia was as far back as I could find to actually hear with my own ears (thanks to their Myspace), and from that one song I’d say they were in the symphonic blackened death metal realm with a fairly high level of technicality. A certain thrashiness and more melody ala Gothenburg began creeping into their sound by 2005’s Synthetic Existence, though it still wasn’t far removed from its predecessor. Now in 2008 we have The Inside, and while the symphonic element and technical leanings are still very much present, there isn’t much in the way of black metal but rather a thrash/death mixture with a heaping dose of melody.

The first thing that caught me off guard about The Inside was the clean vocals that are peppered throughout the album. At first, they pretty much threw my listening experience off – so much so, that I had to stop listening after the fourth or fifth track. I made it a bit further the second go around, but I still had not gotten accustomed to them and had to abandon the session again. After that I didn’t pick it up for awhile, and when I came back they seemed much less out of place and gelled with the album really well giving it more diversity – it hit me that they are quite similar to the clean vocals employed by God Forbid on their latest two albums (which also took some getting used to). Outside of those cleans (which are not used in every track), the vocal style sits somewhere between a black-ish rasp and a more guttural low, often alternating between the two (or three) seamlessly.

Musically, the symphonic elements are downplayed quite a bit and limited to a mostly atmospheric role with pretty good results amidst the death/thrash that forms the core of their sound – it gives the album yet more diversity, keeping the songs fresh and independent of one another. There are a couple points were they are very pronounced, such as the ending of “A Thousand Falling Skies” were the rest of the instrumentation and vocals fall out, and the mid section of follow up track “Inhuman Corrosive Report”.

There is some rather exceptional guitar work to be heard here and there, such as the solo in “Thing I Will Never Feel” that really caught my attention and some of the riffing in “Ready to Leave”, as well as the solo in the same song. Speaking of that song, the opening riff (which can also be heard again later on) is eerily similar to the opening guitar strains of Carcass’ classic Heartwork opener “Buried Dreams” – it’s not a complete lift, but very similar sounding. The acoustic beginning of the excellent “Escaping Reality” is rather stellar as well, and once again shows the diversity on display here.

A consistent highlight through the album is the drumming of Morteus – it’s strong and muscular yet not overpowering, keeping a mostly fast and aggressive pace throughout with bits of blasting in all the right places, and lots of solid double bass as well as some ear catching hand work. A couple of the best moments are the opening and closing tracks, “My Senseless Theory” and the self titled track, respectively.

What Destinity have done with The Inside may not be entirely original, but they have made a great effort to provide a breath of fresh air to realm of death/thrash, and it seems that they absolutely refuse to stagnate from album to album, which I think is a good thing even though I’m sure a good chunk of their older fans have been left scratching their heads and asking “What the fuck?” Regardless of what some may think, Destinity have released a highly listenable and memorable effort here in their chosen style.

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