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A Traitor Like Judas - Nightmare Inc.

Nowadays, every new band seems to consider themselves the architects of a unique musical genre. It's not enough anymore to be just a metal act; now you're post-goth nu-emopunk industricore metal or something, even though you sound exactly like Killswitch Engage or Green Day.

A Traitor Like Judas have actually been kicking around small town Germany since the turn of the millennium or so and have one previous full-length to their name, as well as an EP and a split CD, but they are, apparently, the foremost proponents of the 'NWOEMM', or the 'New Wave of European Modern Metal' - which is the same thing as the New Wave of American Heavy Metal but played by floppy-fringed Germans instead of thick-necked Yanks.

To put it plainly, A Traitor Like Judas are yet another metalcore troupe; to put it even more plainly, A Traitor Like Judas are yet another group dressing up their melodic Swedish thrash/death metal fixation with some leftover nu-metal aesthetics. I reckon it would be safe to say that At The Gates and The Haunted feature heavily on the i-pods of the individual A Traitor Like Judas band members.

This is metalcore through and through, and a track-by-track analysis of 'Nightmare Inc.' would get very samey very quickly. Each song is a seemingly unending stream of furious, palm-muted guitar triplets chugging away over complicated bass drum patterns and practically irrelevant bass guitar, all to the accompaniment of vocalist Bjoern Decker's scorched-throat howl. The tempo is generally kept high, although the obligatory metalcore breakdowns do crop up. The clichés aren't only musical; the album cover, with its eagle head motif and muted colour palette, is typical of the style favoured in this genre. Even the font used for the band name conforms to the metalcore rulebook.

And yet . . . I have trouble stopping my head from bobbing along to the music when I listen to this CD, even on my long weekly commute down the M4 to south Wales. A Traitor Like Judas may never have had an original thought in their lives, but the execution is fairly spot on. The riffs and melodies may be oldies, but there're certainly goodies, and there's an energetic charm to 'Nightmare Inc.' which you'd need a heart of stone to ignore. And of course, there's a reason why we all love At The Gates. Their magic formula of speedy thrash riffs delivered with a strong melodic sensibility is a consistently appealing one, and as such it's hard not to warm to a band who can imitate a little of their allure. To use a cliché myself, if you like this sort of thing, then you'll like this.