UMUR
"Overflow" is the 3rd full-length studio album by Greek death metal act Sickening Horror. The album was released through Deepsend Records in March 2015. It´s the successor to "The Dead End Experiment" from 2009. Six years between albums is a pretty long time, and I was beginning to fear we had heard the last from Sickening Horror, but "Overflow" is now here to prove my assumptions of their demise wrong. There have been a couple of lineup changes since the last album though, so that might explain the long time between albums. Drummer Jose Theodorakis has been replaced by Vasilis Antipatis, and Andreas Karayiannis has been added as a second guitarist transforming Sickening Horror from a trio into a four-piece.
Sickening Horror played a technical yet still pretty old school and brutal type of death metal on their first two albums, but "Overflow" sees them take quite a left turn into progressive/technical death metal territory, and if I didn´t know better I wouldn´t have guessed that it is the same act playing on "Overflow", as the one playing on the first two albums. The band has added occasional piano/keyboards to their sound, progressive sections, fusion influenced drumming, and melodic guitar solos to their music and has generally incorporated an adventurous approach to writing music (although they still embrace regular growling vocals, and a fairly high level of brutality). In many ways it makes their music stand out a bit more than their earlier more standard sounding death metal releases, but the progressive nature of the material isn´t always natural sounding, and at times comes off as a bit forced.
It works pretty well on tracks like "The Day the Worms Became Kings" and "Fractal Maze", but there are other times when the tracks aren´t as well functioning. Overall the material is of a relatively high quality though and I would probably have rated "Overflow" pretty highly if it wasn´t for the rather cheap sounding production. To my ears it sounds a bit amaturish and home produced, and especially the clicky and lifeless drum sound ruins the listening experience. Thankfully both the high level musicianship and to a lesser degree the songwriting pull in the other direction and a 3.5 star (70%) rating isn´t all wrong.