When starting off "Hell Awakening" by SILIUS, hearing the galloping riff in the opening track that offers aggression but not much more, it's hard to tell right away whether this is going to be a keeper. The vocals of Matthias Thumer are subsequently heard, and he's able to sing extremely potent melodies with a very harsh screamed tone that suits these thrash songs perfectly. Also, in the second part of the song before the main riff returns we hear a really tight solo. Nothing out of the ordinary for the genre, but well executed. The band in general sounds very locked in and tight with one another. That being said, in this day and age it's not always easy to tell if that's 100% the case for every member given the ease of editing in modern Digital Audio Workstations. If you take TRIVIUM's original drummer Travis for the album "Ascendancy" for example, at least in rumor, his drums had to be heavily quantized in the DAW because his original performance wasn't tight to the songs.

Speaking of drum editing, I had to question if I was hearing a drum machine on the album as I was listening. The snare and kick drum hits are all compressed to the same dynamic level and have the same tone. There's definitely a drummer listed in Ralph Jurschitsch both in the promotional booklet and other sources, though: clearly his drums are just triggered as hell. Even the cymbals sound the exact same on a lot of the strikes, but there's more dynamics in them than the aforementioned kick and snare. The rest of the sound engineering is alright, but certainly far from the best out there. The guitars sound beefed, there's a slight bit of masking, but the vocals really stand out!... and the bass guitar hardly does at all. Buried bass is obviously such a prevalent problem on metal records that it's almost become a meme, but here it's so buried that when you finally hear it by itself after the other instruments drop out, you hear how extremely low in volume it is. The mixing engineer didn't even bother to bring it up in level from where it is on the album in general, it sounds like.

"Immortalize" hearkens to the southern PANTERA type of aggressive groove metal while still being a thrash metal song, and by the time "War Planet" starts up, you can start to notice a trend of each song being better than the last. The intro to this song somehow manages to make a slight down-tune of their sound be quite heavy with the strength of the chunky riff. When great harmonies are then superimposed on top, followed by an intense transition into catchy as hell groove riffs, the whole thing just blossoms even further. This is something you notice throughout the album in general: a proper batch of catchy but intense collection of riffs, guitar solos, grooves and vocal lines (although the lyrics are lacking in originality at a number of points). Every song on here offers at least one memorable moment that isn't quite found again in the same way on other songs, too. They're all distinct but well organized pieces of music.

The trend of the songs increasing in quality as you listen through comes to a bit of a halt once "Anger Management" starts up. Hearing a song about this topic it may be a little difficult not to be taken aback slightly from how silly it can come across. The song begins with the least electrifying riff up to this point, and then there's some clean vocals that really don't make the mark. The remainder of the song gets heavier, but not as remarkably so as the preceding songs, causing this one to come across as average. Similar issues crop up in the song after this one as well as "Tool of Destruction," but they are structured in much more cohesively and interestingly. "Tool of Destruction," along with a few other songs like the album closer which hearkens back to the classic "One" by METALLICA, also sports a really brooding and bleak clean guitar tone which adds another nice angle to the band's sound.

I've included below the best song on the album, "Message in a Molotov," and it offers the best of what this band has to display in their sonic onslaught: the most punishing riffs on the record through the majority of it's runtime with a bridge section comprised equally of parts infectiously groovy and epic. Be on the look out for more from this band, because this is a solid debut. As Anthony Fantano might say: I'm feeling a strong 7 to a light 8 on this thing. It's far from perfect, but absolutely enjoyable.