Hello Temple, today I bring you "Monophobia" by VINEGAR HILL. This small band from Styria his giving us their second full-length album to date. It falls in the ever growing Melodic Death Metal subgenre. They clearly have the potential to be in the best bands of this sphere of metal.

But it's not all good, I think the voice needs to be worked on a bit. Sometime, I felt it was more talking than singing with the growl staying on the same tone a lot. I also love any kind of discordant tone, but it was a bit too much on some songs. My second major problem with this album is the length. They are calling it a full-length album, but with only a 32 minutes running time, it is more in the categories of EP if you ask me.

With 9 songs and running 32 minutes, this means the songs are pretty short all the way through. I would have loved to have more material to really get a better grip on the content. And this album also includes 2 songs from Singles, "Firebirds" and "Faint Cold Fear".

If I have to choose my favourite songs out of the album, "The Shadowman" and "Solitary Bay" would come ahead. They are very Melodic and clearly the compositor of those pieces knows how to create a song to catch the ears.

"Something That Sleeps" and "The Cage" are two examples of what I was saying earlier. The clear voice is fine, but when the growl kicks in, it stays on the same tone throughout the song.

By all means, this is not a bad album. It has a lot of catchy Melodic sounds that I rather enjoyed. But there are a few bits and pieces that annoyed me somewhat. It is very close to being an amazing album. Give it a bit more meat and a little more work on the voice and it would rise to the top of the mass very quickly.