Bands anything remotely like LORD MANTIS are impossible to find. It's all well and good to make a gory, brutal Death Metal record and call yourself controversial and hope to 'gross out' some of your listeners, but this Chicago band have moved past any simple shock and horror monikers, without resorting to an inaccessible wall of sound.

The first of the 7 lengthy tracks of abhorrent discord is "Body Choke", seemingly composed to assault the human psyche from all angles. Opening with slithering tendrils of Doom riffs, the band gradually evolves this with pickups in speed and heaviness, capitalizing on a strangled and pained vocal delivery, with eerie and vitriolic industrial effects put to effective use. "Possession Prayer" is a compulsive and hypnotic pulse, deliberately monotonous for the majority; if one's obsessive labelling could go to ludicrous levels as 'Industrial Blackened Doom'. But fear not; one need not bother trying to categorize this band; the music does not deserve the restriction that mere labels impose.

"Negative Birth", surprisingly, is one of the slowest, filthiest dirges I have ever heard, with an inescapably slow tempo acting as weights, pulling you through a swamp of no worldly description. At least, that is, until you're thrust into a terrifically Blackened series of blast riffs, catapulting you through a subterranean nightmare. Lastly, "Three Crosses", clocking it at 10 minutes, is the longest and easily the most complex track. In a way, it feels like a longer version of "Negative Birth", with a similar pattern of evolving, undulating funereal-speed riffs, spurned by dark melodies into yet another outbreak in speed and heaviness, discordant melodies at constant battle with each other.

When done right, inaccessibility and abhorrence of some of the world's most extreme of Metal, can become a loveable, addictive novelty.

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