I took the bait and suffered its consequences. What I mean by that is BURIAL HORDES were "professional" about promoting "Incendium" with their track, "Unleash Havoc". If you listen to the first half it's alluring and sucks you right in. I was dazed to the point where logically analyzing the remaining part of the song escaped me. The catalyst of the lure was the sound qualities. These qualities are similar to musician groups such as ULCERATE, BLUT AUS NORD, DEATHSPELL OMEGA, etc. If you are familiar with those groups you might suspect to what I'm referring. Well, if BURIAL HORDES did follow up with this sound it might've been an average to a decent album. But unfortunately, that was not the case. Instead, it only served as a teaser for "Unleash Havoc" and was absent for the duration of the rest of the album.

This sound (let's loosely call it "Avant-Garde") does intrigue me a lot personally but even if the entire album was surrounded by these qualities it would've been, like I stated before, an average album. Why? The type of drumming exhibited by Nuctemeron does not compliment the guitarists' style and causes conflict within the listening experience. His drumming is more accessible and more suitable for those types of bands who love to ravage their sound with blast-beats and fills for 90% of the time. Avant-Garde Extreme Metal obviously does not do well if these are the blueprints of such an album. With that aside, "Incedium" sounds nothing like the aforementioned topic. Instead, it's an abstract album with monotonous musicians. You have so many ideas tightly-packed into a 40 minute album that the flow is constantly disrupted and suffers greatly for it. The transitions in-between are so messy that confusion is all that arises.

I honestly don't know where to start with their sound. In some instances the vocalist and guitarists sound very similar to THE RUINS OF BEVERAST. The guitarists play low-tuned almost doom (blackened) sounding riffs while vocals breach similar growls to that of "Blood Vaults". Yet not once is atmosphere built, instead it's drenched in intensified pride. The music that surfaced is disconnected therefore creating shallow experimentations. There are also times where these growls are topped with accessible Death Metal (i.e. AEON) and again I am left dumbfounded. The extrinsic experimentations and confusion that I'm referring to are the shifts mostly. I cannot even explain it clearly. It's like one of those cases where they try every combination possible as to pass off as some Metal guru who understands the flow of music. I mean just imagine a band that shifts between AEON, DARK FUNERAL, and THE RUINS OF BEVERAST (two out of three suck, choose wisely). I mean take these three examples and shift them around until you get every combination possible and that's basically what they do. They even shift around interdependently to furthermore bamboozle your expectations.

The heavy burden could've been lifted if BURIAL HORDES had a drummer that actually considers and puts some forethought into his/her compositions. I feel terrible laying the entire fault on solely the drummer. To be fair, none of the musicians shined so in truth they're all at fault. Go have some bonding time and learn about each other a bit more. The songwriting is absolutely terrible there's no way around that. As a last note I might've been a bit harsh about the "two out of the three" deal. AEON isn't that bad actually, I'm just not much of a fan.