Fully Consumed – Incendium – Album Review

Source // Fully Consumed

The resurgence of melody and technicality in metal of late is encouraging indeed. The copious amount of bands that seem to base their careers on the ‘chugga-chugga’ riffs are thankfully in decline and while a sizable portion of these ‘lowest open string riders’ remain, the increase in Metal bands using chromatic-ism and odd-time signatures is becoming refreshingly apparent.

Enter Akron Ohio’s Fully Consumed. A band who offer the listener a chaotic, melodic, yet strangely reassuringly familiar blast of Death Metal on their latest offering, Incendium. The band’s sound seems to straddle the fence, as many bands do these days, between technical Death Metal, brutal slam and Death-core; albeit in small, manageable portions. The riffs are explosive bursts of ephemeral destruction, never settling in the listener’s ears for more than a few seconds and although this maybe unnerving to some, the chaotic nature of these riffs are far from boring and remain interesting and catchy throughout.

The production is a major highlight of Incendium as each instrument, including the vocals, can be heard with crystal clear clarity. The first song, “Soul Possesion”, is a prime example of this as the guitars assault the sonic spectrum with a plethora of dissonance and careful and precise execution. The next two tracks follow a similar path of unrelenting, repentless shredding. “Warbox Liar” however, is the bands shining moment. Beginning with a bass arpeggio that sets the tone for the entire composition, it signals the first of several moments that distance the band from the majority of the modern Death Metal flock; a dynamic chord progression, not commonly seen in Death Metal, furthers this point.

Traces of Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse and Job For A Cowboy are found throughout this release, culminating in a sound that is hard to pinpoint. Perhaps this exemplifies Fully Consumed’s goal? To take the listener into the fiery depths of their album with no respite, to be ‘fully consumed’ by their Death Metal artistry. 9/10