Given that Christmas is just around the corner, it's a fair bet that a lot of people are on the verge of killing themselves right now. It's dark, it's cold and there are only so many times you can hear that fucking SLADE song. If you're after something unremittingly grim to slash your wrists to in front of a burning pile of reindeer corpses, BETRAYED'S "Consuming Darkness" is a reasonable choice, but if you're in need of anything other than darkness and pain look elsewhere.

This is the sort of Metal that all the Internet warriors refer to as 'kvlt' and 'tr00.' It's ten tracks of Blackened, Thrashened Dick Dastardly Metal from Germany and is as bleak and dispiriting as making a Christmas tree out of dead kittens.

It's also dangerously one dimensional and pretentious. The decision to split it into two sides when it's only thirty five minutes long doesn't seem to make any sense, especially considering there's no audible difference between the first and second halves. It's all blistering and fast paced Death from the pits of Charon, but there's not much more to it than that.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of extremity of course, but despite being their first full length, this feels overwhelmingly familiar. "Bliss Of Torment", "Consuming Darkness" and "Putrid Grave Revealed" for example are all perfectly fine, but they are more or less interchangeable and you'll be hard pressed to remember much about them when the album stops playing. They also come dangerously close to sounding like a baby version of BEHEMOTH on far too many occasions.

Sadly then, it's hard to imagine that BETRAYED are destined for anything other than obscurity. There are a few decent moments, but for the most part this is overly forgettable Blackened Death that's been done a hundred times before. The die-hards who insist on wearing corpse paint while carving the turkey may get a kick out of it, but that's all.