Death Metal is an incredibly hard art to perfect and pull off. You need technicality, pure power, rage, commitment and the ability to keep every song interesting and the Italian death metal band, HUMANGLED attempt to do just this on their third EP "Odd Ethics".

The first track "Needles of the blind" begins with some swirling distorted dialogue about the symptoms of a patient as a doctor is describing them. After the intro comes a fairly soft riff (In Death Metal terms at least) but 50 seconds into it the song becomes... crushing; not fast, not grindingly slow but not oppressively fast, this speed is continued through most of the EP.

The EP is very, very technical but there is still enough power to stop it from becoming soulless like some Shred Metal. One particularly compelling element is the relentless, pounding rhythm and tempo fluctuations which mean that you can never really get too comfortable within a song before it bites you and you are spat out.

The production on the album is as most production on Death Metal albums are; very clean and heavy. One small downer is that the bass is only able to be heard if you either put the bass up on your EQ or listen incredibly hard.

There are a couple of real downsides to this album however; one of these is that there are a couple of songs that feel like filler, these being "Skinned to Feel All" and "Smells Acrid". The other downside is that not only do these songs feel like filler; they also get positively annoying one-and-a-half minutes into them, however saying that, the other two songs, "Needles of The Blind" and "Deny Your Creed" are seriously, seriously good.

The "Odd Ethics" EP by HUMANGLED is only really good for two songs, even the crushing music and absolutely excellent vocal performance cannot quite redeem the other two songs on the EP. This EP goes to show that HUMANGLED have the potential to make some mind-blowing, excellent Death Metal but on an EP like this you cannot afford to have half of the tracks as filler.