Continuing their brand of heavily (and I mean heavily) Immolation and Incantation inspired form of consistent, muddy, torrid yet forgetful death metal, Seattle’s Drawn and Quartered are back with album number 5, and while it’s certainly not a bad album, it’s not really an album we need this year.

Admittedly, Drawn and Quartered make no bones about their influences and wear them on their sleeve, but there has to come a point where the band starts to develop less of a cloning mentality and take some chances, especially after 5 albums. Granted there’s something to be said for sticking to your stylistic guns, and to their credit, much like say Fleshcrawl, who have made a respectable discography aping Dismember, Drawn and Quartered do their thing well, but it’s about as creative and unique as a piece of bread.

The murky production, the ‘backwards’ serpentine riffage, the wailing, off kilter solos and crumbling monotone vocals are all here in spades as are the song structures that shift from faster, swirling atonal blasts (“Sickness Redeemer”, “Merciless Hammer of Lucifer”, “Bloodbath of Renewal”, “Sodomy and Heresy”) to more menacing and swampy loping moments (“A Final Solution”, “Funeral Pyres of Annihilation”) all of them safely tucked away from the elite status of their peers due to simply ho hum song writing despite plenty of skill.

With the great death metal releases that have thus far graced 2007, Drawn and Quartered, as with the rest of their releases are bound to get lost in the shuffle with most except hardened purists and die hards as there is simply too much better death metal around right now.

[Visit the band's website]

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