The Fifth Sun – The Moment of Truth (Clouds Block the Sun)
Ummm, melodic death metal from America, but clearly worshipping at a Swedish altar. In fact, this thing was recorded at Studio Fredman. Now, how an unsigned band scraped toegether enough money to make that trip is beyond me, but hey, who am I to question? So back to the music, what you’ve got here is pretty standard NWOSDM, down to the hint of clean vocals in some of the choruses, or the tough-guy machismo bullshit in a couple of the songs, or the triplets running over the verses, or the galloping/breakdown drum patterns, or... well, you see where I’m going here. Infuse all that with a nice American hardcore/straightedge/vegan ethic and well, this is what you get. Could we get any more generic? Repetitive? Pointless? This is nice and entertaining stuff, but ummmm, where’s the originality, gang? All this shit has been done before, if not better, at least as well, by very many bands. It’s kinda tiresome, to be honest. But fun, though. I can’t stress that enough. Even though there might not be many original ideas here, they’re at the very least imitated correctly. This is fine for the occasional listen, like when you wanna throw in obscure bands that no one will know about, but it’s otherwise completely pre-packaged, ready-to-ship D2M material.
Recommended Tracks:
Obligatory ones:
2 – nice groove
3 – nice guitar
5 – pro-environmental protection and stuff, but silly lyrics
6 – best song here, actually achieves an excellent feel of pure anger and hatred
7 – driving double bass and triplets and cool bass
8 – with minimal keyboards
P.S. Shit, come to think of it, another American band recorded a CD at Studio Fredman rather recently. Darkest Hour’s latest CD was recorded in Sweden at the same studio. Come to think of it, this sure sounds a lot like that CD...