Splattered with gore and lurching drunkenly from one nasty slice of medieval butchery to the next, three piece Death Metal act MISEO have delivered a solidly entertaining debut album. Clearly taking their inspiration from the American school of death, "Lunatic Confessions" is a fan's love letter to the likes of OBITUARY, DYING FETUS and CANNIBAL CORPSE. There's the occasional whiff of Hardcore as well, but it's little more than a passing fancy and the vast majority of it is so old school, it could have crawled from the Florida swamps in the mid-80s and scared the shit out of the moral majority.

And like most of their heroes, "Lunatic Confessions" does get a bit one-dimensional if listened to entirely in one sitting, but ingested in bite size chunks it is very enjoyable. The title track for example is like being kicked in the face by one of the Four Horsemen's demonic steeds. It's a rotting cadaver of planet sized guitar riffs, phlegm spitting vocals and a rhythm section designed solely to induce synchronised head-banging. "Skin Dress" meanwhile slows things down ever-so-slightly and has a distinct redneck groove to it, while "No Guts No Glory" is essentially a mosh pit in a dingy Polish nightclub distilled into a song.

Elsewhere, "Greed Kills" is perhaps the most 'core' track on here. Anyone that first got into death metal by looking up JOB FOR A COWBOY's Myspace page will enjoy this one, but even though it might threaten to descend into a breakdown at any moment, it never does and remains defiantly old school. "Ueberzucht Und Untergang" is perhaps the heaviest track and its vicious, up tempo pace could only be more intense if it gave adrenaline shots to a zombie horde, while "Five Star Doc" is like the soundtrack to a psychopaths nightmares.

In fact the only real issue with "Lunatic Confessions" is that for all their plus points, most of these songs are pretty samey. It takes a couple of listens before the subtle differences between the tracks make themselves known and even though it's less than forty minutes long, it still feels like a long album. Even killing sprees can get monotonous after a while, but for the most part this is reliably over the top Death Metal with more hits than misses.<