DEVOID — A God's Lie (review)

Album · 2010 · Thrash Metal

4/5 · 2010-09-30
Time Signature

New metal order...

Genre: death-thrash

"A God's Lie" is the debut album by Indian death-thrashers Devoid, one of the bands of the thriving Indian metal scene. With their high quality death-thrash, Devoid represent the more extreme parts of the Indian metal scene.

Their style of thrash metal spreads pretty well across the palette of thrash metal, using elements from a lot of different subgenres of thrash metal from old school in-your-face riffage over technical thrash metal to more modern melodic thrash metal and more brutal death thrash (and a couple of references to classic heavy metal) - in fact the only thrash metal subgenre that is not represented in Devoid's music on this release is groove thrash (well, there is actually a quite groovy section in "Possessed" and one in "Devoid of Emotions"). I really like how Devoid takes the listener on a journey through thrash metal.

I think that the production is very good: it's not too polished, but it's still crisp and well-defined, so you can hear what's going on musically.

The opening track "A Silent Death" is an atmospheric track, starting out with a dark atmospheric keyboards and an acoustic guitar before fading into a vague air siren after which the first song "Battle Cry" starts.

"Battle Cry" is mostly an all out old school high octane thrash metal tune, but with some more modern sounding parts, and a cool heavy breakdown just before the solo.

The next track "Possessed" is interesting, because it starts out a Suffocation-style brutal death metal song, complete with blastbeats and guitar harmonics to boot, but then morphs into an almost Anthrax-like mid-tempo old school thrash metal pattern and later melodeath-like riffage is included as well. This is a really well balanced brutal and aggressive track.

"Devoid of Emotions" is perhaps my favorite track off the album, because it contains some fast galloping riffage and also a Sepultura-like riff (from before they started playing tribal metal), and, as if that's not, there are also some melodeath parts nice breakdowns.

"Black Fortress" is more in the vein of melodic death metal, or perhaps the style of "Kreator", while "Hate Cult" and "New World Order" are two breakneck Slayer-like tracks, while the bonus track "Beersong" is very old school..

"A God's Lie" contains some really brilliant old school thrash metal riffage paired with some more technical death metal-like sections and a heavy mid-section the reminds me a bit of Pantera's more brutal stuff. This is a very good and varied thrash metal track.

I must say, I really like "A God's Lie" by Devoid. It's great thrash metal, and I really like how varied it is - as I said, it's a journey through thrash metal, with Devoid as the tourist guide who shows us all the great sights of thrash metal. I'm already looking forward to their next release.

This is quality death-thrash, and I'd recommend it to all fans of thrash metal. I think that a lot of fans of both melodic death metal and traditional death metal will like this album, too.