I feel sick and exhausted with this female fronted fashion. It has reached plague levels for Metal scene and when I'm thinking that many previous bands were buried for this reason drives me under more thinking. Take a look for example to bands like United Kingdom's SACRILEGE and many others. Compare them, or groups like HOLY MOSES, with ARCH ENEMY and you will realize why I'm bitching.
Now let's move to INCASSUM, another new 'woman in vocals' band. They are coming from Manchester and they started around September of 2004 emerging from the Salford University. Their name means In Vein in Latin language, so is their around-30-minutes debut album. Before this they had recorded probably two demos but I'm not familiar with it so I don't know anything about. Andy Giblin, a producer whom may be known to you via bands like NAPALM DEATH and SLIPKNOT (I must clean my hands with surgical spirit for what I wrote) made the production, mixing and mastering around February and March of 2008 in MCC Studios in Manchester and the result is this six-pieces album.
OPETH is a basic influence for INCASSUM and that is easy to be noticed in the beginning of The Beckoning where we have something like a copy/paste thing. They continue more into ARCH ENEMY's guitar base, as in tracks like History Repeats or the refrain of All These Lies. Generally the band's musicianship is in good level and the guitar players have written some stuff that is not bad. Bad is the lack of their personality and the trite themes they use. What makes it worst are the vocals that especially in the brutal parts are completely soul-less. The duality between brutal and clean is without meaning and their flatness doesn't bring the air that is needed for the songs to breathe. On the other hand, the clean ones - despite the good timbre - are missing the capable inspiration and feeling making them more listenable. In my opinion, if you want to scream you have to speak about equivalent themes; OK, if you don't want about zombies and the rest something other or else the whole result looks like fake and incongruously written.
One good thing is their diversity in their themes, probably their gamut listening provide this and they must work more on this both musically and more in the vocals 'cause I repeat they don't miss the good timbre but of the feel. This reflects perfect inside the So Red song, which carries a melancholic color somewhere lost in the first steps of THIRD AND THE MORTAL.
To end, we have heard much worst things; hence, the rating below.