The Sky is the Limit
Much like the sound of two cars colliding at 100mph, Burning Skies make your ears bleed. But unlike the aforementioned accident, this angry death metal band make the experience so much more enjoyable than sitting in A&E for five hours until your gaping head wound is attended to.
There's the urge nowadays to get a successful and enjoyable metal formula, and try to add a unique twist to it, and as time has progressed, these tweaks have got stranger and stranger until we end up with Leprechaun Metal, Banjo-core and Black Trance.
Unfortunately, Burning Skies have decided to jump on the tweak bandwagon. Fortunately, they jumped back off soon enough to grab themselves a fantastic new sound without being at all irritating - the astounding amount of anger here.
Now, anger in metal isn't anything new - Slayer, Mayhem, Children of Bodom and so on all seem perfectly pissed off - but Burning Skies have intensified their anger and have let it erupt over all of their music - something some bands seem to fail to do.
They also avoid the somewhat irritating token slow moment - something Finnish legends Children of Bodom are horrendously guilty of. They can carry it off, though, and I get the feeling Burning Skies couldn't. So they simply don't slow up. Everything on here is very fast and very, very angry.
However, this album is not without its faults - of which I believe there are two. Firstly, track number four - Nacroleptic Suicide Attempt. I had to listen to this song maybe three times before even beginning to understand what on earth was going on. The last two thirds of the song are perfectly fine, but the first half sounds like Cradle of Filth meet Hatebreed. It’s a bizarre combination - Black metal and this Death-core simply do not mix well together in one song.
My other problem is the vocals. Now, they're angry, as we've previously established repeatedly, but sometimes they do sound a bit too Deicide and not enough Stampin' Ground.
But overall, despite these two tiny little issues, "Murder by Means of Existence" rips through you like a well designed, perfectly built and already blood stained buzzsaw. I'm sure as hell that I want to be shredded by Burning Skies, and I'm pretty damn sure that you'll want to, as well.