The debut full length from DEAD IN THE MANGER is everything you would expect from a Death Metal or Grindcore band with aspects of Black Metal thrown in. Taking Metal's three most extreme subgenre's presents us with a solid wall of sound, with small bits of melody squeezing their way through the few gaps that remain.

In the ever ongoing competition in Metal to see who can be the most brutal, entrails churning behemoth out there, DEAD IN THE MANGER can't be too far from the top. In addition they're probably somewhere near the top of the list for boring, unoriginal brutality. High speed tremolo riffing, accompanied by blast beats and vocals that are so incoherent they may as well just be screaming, have served bands well for many years, and I am absolutely not saying they should vanish. My problem with DEAD IN THE MANGER is that the listening experience comes across as a band trying to be heavy for the sake of heavy with no real direction.

There are departures from this, "Part V" has a slow brooding opening and sounds really good, before diving back into exactly the same sound that engulfs the rest of the album. There's really nothing else to say, the album goes stale after a couple of listens, becoming just tedious.

I find it hard to show any form of sympathy for this record. Doubtless people will like it, hell I would probably like it if I'd never heard anything like it before, but I have heard everything this album has to offer before. DEAD IN THE MANGER strike me as a band that is more concerned with being as fast and brutal as possible without actually stopping to think about the music they're making. The heavier and sonically compact music is the more it needs something to make it stand out from the rabble. "Cessation" is the perfect example of this. Uninspired.<