I had heard a lot of good things about SHATTER MESSIAH from their performance at Powerfest 2007 to their tour with TO/DIE/FOR, which wasn't that successful numbers wise, but I heard there was some great performances. The other tid bit I knew about this band was that the main guitar player was in NEVERMORE and ANNIHILATOR; I happened to be big fans of both, so I was eagerly anticipating this album.

Curran started the band in 2005 by himself.  His first goal was to find a singer, which according to my source took a while.  After Greg was found the rest of the band just fell into place. They teamed up with EPICUREAN and TO/DIE/FOR on U.S. tour that did fairly well.  Their new album, God Burns Like Flesh should be out Oct. 29th via Dockyard 1

Idolater starts strong with some influence from a certain former guitar player's band, but they aren't as obvious on this one as they are throughout the rest of the album.  The NEVERMORE influence though gets pretty strong towards the middle of the track. Towards the end though while Greg still kind of sounds like Warrel he does try to add his own flare at parts which I is cool. The second song could have came directly off Dead Heart, In Dead World and I think they should have just totally left it off the album. There is a little more originality in third track, but not much.  

I am having a real problem with this disc for some reason. I think it is because this band sounds SO much like NEVERMORE its pretty ridiculous.  What I really don't understand is, why they do? Curran used to be live member of NEVERMORE, but only live. I couldn't find anything about him actually playing on anything NEVERMORE other than one solo. I guess I can understand that he was a touring member with these guys for two albums, but if he didn't contribute to the writing then, why kind of take someone else's style and why ask Greg sound like Warrel. I have listened to one of Greg's previous bands Archetype and I didn't hear the resemblance then. Pathwayhas very cool chorus that breakdowns and is extremely haunting in nature.  About midway through the track there is pretty sick guitar solo that I assume is done by Curran. Stripped Of Faith repeats the same structure as track 4 but with a slightly groovy guitar part rather than one that is more thrash.

Track 6 is a little more on the original end of things like the first track, which I thought was a good thing since I having looking for the more original stuff on this album the entire time I have been listening. Burned In Black, while I find this to be one of favorite tracks on the album and it only has parts of the song that could appear on NEVERMORE albums like my other favorite from the album track one. The song is just so solid that I have to overlook the NEVERMORE sound-a-like-ness.  The track has two excellent melodic parts as well as an absolutely shredding guitar solo. It officially took until the last track on the album over them to have song that was almost solely their own. The singer sounds different on this track than he does on the rest of the album.  While this song is NEVERMORE influenced almost ever other song on the album could have been a NEVERMORE song.
I think that there will be a lot of people on the fence about this band due to their NEVERMORE relatedness. Some will hate it because of the direct NEVERMORE influence while others will praise it because they love NEVERMORE so much. Then there will be people that think it is a solid album, but it could definitely go so more places musically on the album then it does. Guess which camp I belong to by my rating.