UMUR
Organic Transcendence is a one man Swedish death metal project and "Power in the Blood" is the debut demo by the artist. The demo was self-released in September 2010. I found the demo for free legal download on the Death Metal Invasion site.
The demo consists of 5 tracks and features a full playing time of 25:25 minutes. So there´s plenty of time and material to evaluate the sound and quality of Organic Transcendence´s music. The first four tracks are brutal technical death metal while the last track "Mute City" is a kind of spoof track. The Nintendo cover track is listed as a bonus track on the demo. While "Mute City" is actually quite a great track with some really impressive lead guitar shredding it´s of course the four "regular" tracks that should be focused on the most.
All four tracks are of high quality. Very talking technically well played, varied and quite intriguing death metal. I´m really impressed by the instrumental part of the demo. It´s not even that obvious that the drums are programmed. The high-hat sound gives it away though. It should be mentioned here that the production is otherwise really good. But while the instrumental part of the compositions, the production and the playing are way above average for what you can usually expect from a demo, the vocals unfortunately ruin a lot of the listening experience for me. I´ll be a bit provocative here and say they are downright awful. I really hope Simon ( the man behind the project) tries a different vocal approach on his next release because the hoarse monotone barking dog style really doesn´t work. At least not for me.
So there are mostly positive things to say about "Power in the Blood" and a few flaws that are unfortunately rather disturbing for my listening pleasure. I was prepared to rate "Power in the Blood" as high as 3.5 - 4 star rating but because of the vocals I´ve settled on a 3 star rating. But I tell you that if those vocals are fixed, Organic Transcendence is an act to look out for in the future.