Here in the UK, it’s snowing. It’s the end of March and it’s snowing. This can only mean one thing: Armageddon. The end of the world is nigh. The persistence of Winter and its domination over Spring marks the inauguration of the great erasure. All that signified difference in the world – or at least the UK – now lies frozen beneath the white blanket of nature in all its destructive indifference. And as beautiful as it is to see the world bleached by nature’s whimsy, there’s always that arresting awareness that extolling uniformity as a virtue is never good. It appears that Tampa’s Dark Sermon are blissfully unaware of this. They are yet another band making the bold claim that they are about to smash their way through the clichés and deliver something new and unique and blah blah blah. “Determined to stand apart from the cookie-cutter garbage and trend-following cretins who have overcrowded the scene” (taken from the band bio), they deliver their salvo wrapped up in every cliché that they intend to destroy. So, full of rhetoric, brimming in style, and lacking in substance, Dark Sermon are as plain and drab as all the other bands that make that very same claim. Perhaps then it’s for the best that “they don’t care about what’s marketable or what sells” (again, from their bloated bio).
Like those of their ilk, Dark Sermon are all technically proficient musicians and can wank their way around their instruments faster than a fluffer on amphetamines. There are plenty of body-slamming beats, riffs that go chug chug chug until the sun cries morning, and enough death metal riffage blasted out at ball-blistering speeds to last until this wintery Armageddon draws to its callous close. There’s some impressive guitar work going on here and there such as in ‘The Scales of Justice’ and the atmospheric aspects of ‘Forfeit I – The Crooked Quill’ and ‘Forfeit II – Worn Thin’. ‘The Tree of New Life’ features an impressive acoustic section but that’s soon consumed by the fire of a thousand riffs at a thousand BPM. But with vocalist Johnny permanently stuck in “Hulk Smash” mode, what the band is doing is grossly overshadowed by his one-dimensional approach. Cranked to maximum from beginning to end, Dark Sermon are too eager to prove that they mean every testicle-swelling word of their machismo mission statement to stand out from the whitewash of Deathcore uniformity. Oh look, it’s snowing again…
5/10
Jason Guest