Waking up the horrid being inside, the atrocity lurking within, the hellish nature of inhumanity heading closer to your direction. But it is all an illusion, a quandary of two personalities of a single individual, between an angel and a demon, between a common man and a manmade monstrosity. The ultimate inner struggle, a raging conflict boasting, always rigid, a process that will never cease, philosophical our not, every person has that monster contained but it is ever ready to be unleashed from its chains. Exploring the rougher human attitude hail the Swedish Gothenburg driven Death Metal cravers of DEGRADEAD, assuming the role of the late 90s IN FLAMES while devising several additions of modern Thrash Metal. Their previous album, "A World Destroyer" played a big part in my 2011's top 10 list, as I found it to be quite an experience of Swedish Melodic Death Metal, which most of its haze has been lost over the years. With the arrival of the DEGRADEAD's new album, "The Monster Within", keeping it coming out of Metalville Records, things got a little crunchier, wilder, preserving the same roughness but I might also add surprisingly passionate than the previous.

Listening to the band's musical direction on this album, I couldn't help but thinking that eventually DEGRADEAD will head as most of their movement, if I could actually call it that, did throughout the 90s which is sticking tighter to American vibes, adding a little refined Hardcore to their Deathly mixture, letting the melodic perception drop to some extent, entrusting themselves upon over grooving and slamming kickdowns. Nonetheless, at least from what is enclosed within the corridors of "The Monster Within" there is a way to go and several paths to cross. Through the course of the material, DEGRADEAD composed neck breaking songs, arising simple things, not too much complexity packing several chorus driven tunes oozed with catchiness that served them well beforehand. Furthermore, the album's setting included stylish riffing that appeared highly common for the genre, pretty much repeating the same stuff in different variations, yet the soloing turned out quite good. The rhythm section seemed tight, shifting from the speediness of Thrash to groovy Death, also quite conventional without any outstanding sequences but still dynamic. The vocals actually played the biggest part of them all, fluctuating from mid to high register growls to melodic clean varieties that sounded amazing. Similar to the previous album, Mikael Sehlin turned out to be one of the talented singers nowadays in Extreme Metal, a true promise for the years to come when it comes to the mixture of growler and an actual clean singer; no wonder that ENGEL took him as their frontman.

Though far from being the album's foreboding experience, "We'll Meet Again" revealed elegance, strong emotive sensation bursting into the air, well done chorus and fitting riffage for a semi balladry. "Scars of Misery" and "Sorrow Never Survives" are two ultimate new age Melodic Death Metal tunes, with a tweak of Hardcore, yet not overbearing. DEGRADEAD sticking to the genre's commonplace stuff but altogether felt vibrant and quite catchy. "The Monster Within" might have fallen short off the previous album, but still DEGRADEAD showed that they have character, somewhat revamping the old Gothenburg spirit, I liked what they had to prove on this number.