From New Zealand, comes Technical Avant-Garde Death Metal band BLINDFOLDED AND LET TO THE WOODS. "Rejecting Obliteration" is their fourth full-length release, and it has ten songs. "Monolith" is the first. The opening tones are smooth but dissonant, and there is some really nice bass work going on. The vocals are rageful utterances. The music is fairly technical as well as some proggy elements mixed in, and the guitar work is intricate. "Methlehem" is a shorter song, but jam packed with sound. Again, the dissonance in the guitars is probably the element that stands out the most. "Hallucinative Terror" shows more of the band's avant-garde style, with a smooth and mellow opening sound. A heavy, discordant sound breaks in, but the clean passage after the half-way mark is gorgeous.

The title track is a deep and dark foray into the recesses of your mind...to the places you've kept hidden for years. What comes out is something that you don't want the world to see...the stuff of nightmares, and monsters. "Wraith" is another punishing offering. Technical elements are applied evenly with more expansive clean tones. The resulting wrestling match is won by the darker of the two. "Cicada" completes a trilogy of heavy, dissonant songs that react to the light like a creature of the night...it is burned, and turns away, retreating to the shadows. If you saw it, it would melt the eyes out of your head. The clean tones are reason enough to take the chance, however. "Funeral Smiles" is a short, two-minute blistering song.

"The Waves" is another deeply discordant sound, augmented with passages of pure clean bliss. I find myself wishing there were more of these, because the band does melody very well. "Hands of Contrition" has a spellbinding sound that weaves an intricate spider web led by the rhythm guitars. At times, you feel like the sound is unstructured, but indeed, it is very carefully composed. As is often the case in this style, the drummer is absolutely a villain behind the kit. It segues gently into "Caustic Burns." Bass and drums rev up like the engine on a Harley, and the song is off and running. Heavy passages are met with more mellow ones, but as the title suggests, you will burn by the end. Overall, the band is very talented...that much is evident. Many of the songs are so dissonant that feelings of hopelessness increase as the album rides on. But so do feelings of rage. The resulting confusion is what makes the album as good as it is.