Spawn Of Possession is a Swedish technical death metal band that has been around for some time now. This is their second full-length release and their first with label Neurotic Records. These guys clearly have the songwriting skill and the technical skill necessary to make this type of band a success. Some technical death bands just come out sounding like a wall of indistinguishable noise in which the instruments are so horribly intertwined with one another that it fails to be music. Fortunately these guys know what their doing in this genre.

After the symphonic intro track, Lash By Lash starts the album off with some very fast guitar riffing that creates an interesting atmosphere of brutality. The vocals are your typical death metal growls, however they are extremely fast yet comprehensible and vocalist Jonas Renvaktar clearly knows how to put aggression in his voice. Besides that, the guitars are what I notice the most in this song as they use a weird time signature and there is some excellent solo work towards the middle and end of the song. This first track does a great job of giving you a taste of what this band can do. Sour Flow is a slower song towards the middle of the album and one of my favorites. It starts out deep and foreboding, breaking into some heavy, downtuned guitar riffs. This is an example of a really great, epic death metal song. It is almost six minutes long, but I never get bored listening to it. The song is easy to digest (unlike some on this album) and leaves you feeling satisfied from the heavy beginning to the slow, clean ending. It does a great job of showing that this band can also write great music without having to be extremely fast and complex.

This band does an excellent job of mixing in some catchy melodies with their hyperspeed brand of death metal, which is one of the main reasons why they appeal to me so much. At no point does the music just sound like noise; it has character to it and every song has its own unique sound. Some of the songs do get a bit long, with many of them going over four minutes. The problem with this is that there's sometimes so much going on in one song that it's difficult to take it all in. It can be a little overwhelming. All in all though, I really enjoyed Noctambulant. For these guys it's not about proving how fast and how well they can play, although it is impressive, it's about writing some great songs. That is exactly what they have accomplished here. Spawn Of Possession is certainly a band to watch in the future, I look forward to their next album.