Let me put out a word of warning first; if you want to listen to music that will lift your spirits, you might want to ignore this one completely. This is a really depressing album from start to finish, with a lot of topics that will not make you feel any better. We start with extreme beatings in the domestic area and work our way down to the very downward spiralling thoughts on the death of a loved one. And everything in between.

Now we can get to the band: SHIELDS. They hail from the UK and were originally founded in 2012. They released an EP ("Guilt") , which was followed by a very successful debut album in 2018, "Life In Exile". But when their guitarist George Christie suddenly passed away in the same year, it signalled the end of the band. Now, another eight years down the line, the band has surprisingly made their reappearance by letting us all know that they have a new album; "Death & Connection". In the light of what has happened it might have been to expected that they were going to vent all their anger and frustrations into their Metalcore, and they haven't disappointed one bit. The musical spectrum on this album goes from extremely serene to outrageously aggressive, but all with a severe intensity that the band doesn't let up or lessen for one second. This is an exhausting record to listen to.

And even if the capturing and voicing all the frustrations might help SHIELDS past everything that went on in their lives, it will only transfer to the listeners if the music that you produce is able to reach them in some way or form. As far as I'm concerned, it hasn't. And the reason is as simple as can be. "Death & Connection" simply doesn't contain songs that have the ability to adjust the frustrations in such a way that they are translated into pieces of music that make people take notice. In other words, the band has forgotten to change their thoughts into properly listenable songs. Is it all bad? Not at all, as I feel that SHIELDS has a lot of good ideas floating around. They only haven't seen a n opportunity to piece them together in the right order. With a bit of reorganition and some rearranging of the ideas that I hear on "Death & Connection" this could have been a rather good record. Now it's just noise to me.