New Jersey's own horror death metal group Chained to the Dead has released their third EP over at HGPD Records. The quartet has been underground for quite a while, but their breakthrough track "Butcher" amassed over fifty-thousand streams and set a new record for the band. Their newest release, "Something Happened on the Way to Hell," is a shorter EP, but has some talent behind its production. Mixer and masterer Kevin Antreassian is the mastermind behind frenetic and renowned legends The Dillinger Escape Plan, Gridlink, and many more. Sounds like Chained to the Dead is in good hands!

What an album cover! You'd think by the aesthetics it'd be a thrash album, because that's what I thought. Shocking, to say the least. Anyways, the EP starts off with the slow and sample-laden "Rawhead Rex," whatever dinosaur that is. A dreadfully slow tempo drags its feet through a climate of pained vocals and adequately dreary riffs. This all sounds like a put-down, but I'm in the mood for something a bit slower right now. The vocal delivery sounds like the Tasmanian Devil on Ambien, and it'll take me more than one song to get used to it, but this was not a bad opener. Next is "Just Before Dawn." It seems like sampling is a key feature of Chained to the Dead's music, but don't expect to catch every movie they're from. They sure do let the sample play out, as it takes over a minute before CTTD unleashes a barrage of technical drumming and manic singing. The sample for "Return Of The Deadly Spawn" scared the hell out of me as I am sitting in a dark room, and the sample is just some child(?) screaming... not a fan of this cold opening. The music? Alright, but let's find some samples that don't sound like they came out of snuff films. I'm also growing out of the vocals a bit, as there is zero consistency in delivery.

Great. More samples that I am not on the same vibe with. "She Who Kills" starts with some sort of chant by some sort of group of girls, probably dressed in white and holding hands around a pentagram. Groovy segments and technical showoff parts interchange throughout, and I can finally hear some of that bass, too. The singing sounds like a savage monster trying to tear meat off of a turkey leg, and I thought I'd warm up to it by now, but I can't say I have. "Misunderstanding" is the first track to begin without a sample. The simplicity of the song makes it my favorite, as there's nothing extra going on to distract from the band's playing. It was also the shortest - maybe that's why I liked it. The closer is the simple-to-say "Unsuccessfully Coping With The Loss Of Type O Negative." Power metal drumming patterns and some sort of cleaner vocals start, with some sort of howling in a way? There's also some chuckling after the end of every chorus? This is a style switch-up I was not expecting, and I'm not sure how to feel about it ending the project. It doesn't help that it's one of the longer songs of the project.

Conflicting feelings are on the rise with Chained to the Dead's third EP. The cover is not the greatest, the vocals need a very acquired taste to get into with the variety of pitches the vocalist goes through in a song, and the metal instrumentation itself is average in my opinion. I'd say that the whole experience as a package may be a smidge above average, actually, but this EP sounds amateurish at times. Cut it out with the damn samples.