There's something to be said about an album that can inspire what I call a "kick" (a craving to listen to a certain style of music or subgenre), especially when said album inspires the "kick" to be for a  style I haven't delved into since 2011. For their newest release, Turkish quintet Cidesphere bring a somewhat familiar charisma to melodic death metal, combining elements of the genre's heavyweights with a hint of blackened death metal, into a package that's as energetic as it is fun to listen to.

For the album's opener, "Reborn Into Extinction", the band sees no need to pump the brakes, preferring the give the listener a taste of At The Gates style riffs that are equal parts engaging and confident. Even though the same could be said about "Plague Of Greed", this track prefers to deviate in it's latter half in favor of a more classic death metal type of riffing, and even takes a bold stride in being notably heavier than the previous track. The blackened death metal elements really shine brighter in "Living Scars", to the point of being near alienating to the listener, but having vocalist Oral Akyol's distinctive lower end growl really helps this track feel cohesive with the others. "Sacred Patronage" on the other hand, feels more like an estranged tribute to myspace-era deathcore, and feels ironically more out of place than "Living Scars". However, there is a trend with this band taking big leaps during the last half of their tracks; this track returns to the Gothenburg style melodic death metal that was heard previously, but having those style of riffs on top of two-step drum beats makes for an interesting creative choice, to say the least. "Sadist" shows the band can churn out more technically demanding music if need be, but have proven this to be a double-bladed sword. Sure, this is one of the more entertaining tracks to listen to, with a lot of moving parts that feel, for lack of a better term, unpredictable; but it feels like the groundwork for the first few songs of the album has been completely scrapped at this point in favor of more dissonant passages.

I am a firm believer in the notion that bands put a lot of their focus and scrutiny into the title track for a release, as in most cases it tends to be a culmination of the ideas that are present throughout the record, built and rearranged into a sort of "opus". This definitely rings true for "Dawn Of A New Epoch", a track that is successfully able to blend the darker elements with the bravado of the first couple of tracks. "Death Is Only Ours" sees yet another stylistic shift, reverting back into the opener's melodic death roots. Vocalist Oral Akyol makes the creative choice to emphasis higher-middle range of a vocal style this time around, as opposed to the lower growl mentioned earlier; this makes for an interesting dynamic shift, but it isn't executed in a fashion that keeps the attention for long, as it feels severely out of place from the rest of the album. That is until "March Of The Backstabbers" comes on, and has all of the rhythmic tendencies of a "Fiction"-era Dark Tranquillity track, however didn't have the emotional impact one would expect from such a track. . "Hate Design" follows a pretty similar structure, however the chorus of the track is one that I found infinitely more interesting than in "March of the Backstabbers"; I also found this song's more stern contrasts between the verse and chorus' to be something that wouldn't have worked in a less-structured format, but it's a creative choice that pays off in the end. Ending the album with "Sui Caedere" felt wildly incomplete, however; as a 3 minute instrumental piece (more of a solo clean guitar melody soaked in reverb and ambience, but I digress), I really felt as though there was another half of this song that was missing, or maybe even a part two. There was a lot of potential to end the album on a really powerful note with the somber overtone of this track, and unfortunately, even putting the album on repeat doesn't have the same effect.

In the grand scheme of things, I experienced a crescendo of appreciation for this album the more I listened to it. Sure, I could brush it off as a directionless albeit ambitious tribute to the greater Nordic-region death metal bands, but there is more here than that. I have to give credit to the band for expressing their virtuosity, and even though the album doesn't entirely feel cohesive as a whole, the songs themselves stand strong in their own right. This album is definitely worth more than a passing glance, as there are some moments where this LP really shines.