UMUR
"Sense The Darkness" is the 11th full-length studio album by Danish death metal act Illdisposed. The album was released through Massacre Records in September 2012. The regular version features 11 tracks, while the digipack version features 2 bonus tracks ("War" and "Desire").
The music on the album is in the trademark groove oriented death metal style that Illdisposed have more or less played since day one. They´ve added more contemporary sounding keyboards and melodeath traits along the way, but they´ve always sounded like themselves. On this album the keyboards aren´t present and in that respect it´s a more "regular" sounding death metal album, but still more contemporary sounding than old school. Bo Sommer´s distorted and effect laden deep growling, the groovy riffs and the predominantly mid-paced heavy rhythms are in place, and "Sense The Darkness" in many ways feels like another day at the office.
The songwriting is solid (yet not outstanding), the musicianship are strong, and the album features a powerful sound production that suits the music well (although to my ears the clicky bass drum sound doesn´t do the music any favours). Yet the album doesn´t stand out much in the band´s discography and the tracks have a tendency to sound a bit too much the same. It´s solid enough, but not more than that. It´s obvious that Illdisposed have the skills, and backed up by Massacre Records, the money for a strong sound production, so it´s in the songwriting department they could improve.
They sound too comfortable, too at ease with what they do, and I think "Sense The Darkness" suffers because of it. To my ears it lacks bite and passion. It´s still a reasonably strong death metal album though and while my words are probably a bit harsh, a 3 star (60%) rating is still deserved.