Well, well... if this isn't a massive letdown. Evile's 2007 debut Enter The Grave, being one of my favorite albums of the ever-growing thrash revival, was a wonderful homage to the band's influences, containing more memorable hooks and talented musicians than 99% of the bands that Evile share the "Modern thrash" label with. But with their latest album, Infected Nations, the band has made a much slower album in what I can only assume is an attempt at sounding more mature. Perhaps they're attempting to follow in the vein of albums like South Of Heaven or ... And Justice For All (Both albums being from the band's two most obvious influences), but Infected Nations lacks... well, almost everything from those classic records. The speed, the intensity, the overall heaviness that the band used to possess... just what in the hell happened, Evile?

The album starts out in a very misleading way (I absolutely hate things like this) with Infected Nation, easily the best song on the record featuring some of the best riffs the band has ever recorded. It's very fast, very technical, and it also shows off some new key elements to Evile's sound. On Enter The Grave, there were some atmospheric moments that were performed with cleanly distorted, eerily resonating guitars. There's one of these moments in the intro to the track in questions here, but after that ends, the song (And album as a whole) continues to have an evil, atmospheric sound; not because of any clean guitars or howling winds in the background, but because the riffs themselves have a more sinister quality than most anything that Evile has done before. Everything has a more Slayer-ish tone than before, which I'm sure the band was trying to accomplish, and it works very well for them... for this song, that is. But I'll come back to that later. I'll move on to the second and final major noticeable change: The vocals. Before, Matt Drake sounded much like Tom Araya, with slightly more punk-ish twist to it that prevented him from sounding like an exact copy of Araya. Now, he has adopted a style of singing that's much lower in pitch, sounding much like a mix of Araya and Hetfield's style's, only without any of the edge or aggression the two were (Not are, but were) so well known for. Here, Drake simply sounds drunken, and gives an impression that he didn't really put much effort into his vocal contribution on Infected Nations.

Aside from the excellent title track, the rest of the songs on Infected Nations are simply not up to par with what the band is capable of. Most of the songs on the album are far too slow and drawn-out (Only one doesn't breach the five-and-a-half-minute mark), consisting of endless palm-muted power chord chugs; You'll certainly find a great riff or solo (Actually, the solos really are all great) every once in a while, but the interesting moments are too few and far between, hidden deep within the monotonous chord progression as if buried under the pile of writhing corpses featured on the album's cover. Of these slower songs, only one really shines as a success: Genocide. Though the pacing is slow, the musicianship is top-notch, and the creepy melodies are superb; for me, this is the only place where the band succeeds in creating a song based mostly on atmosphere alone. There are a few songs on here that sound like they're going to be true, bonafide thrashers in the beginning (Nosophoros, Devoid Of Thought, Time No More), yet they taper off after the first minute or so and become bogged down by the same boring, repetitive song structure. This is especially disappointing with Devoid Of Thought, which begins with one helluva riff, literally sounding like a hell-bound roller coaster; too bad it derails. The album closes with a cover of Metallica's Call Of Ktulu... whoops, I mean, erm, Hundred Wrathful Dieties, a whopping eleven minute instrumental. Here, Evile really tries to create their own massive instrumental classic as Metallica did with their own sophomore album, yet doesn't nearly reach the same level of majesty and success as that song; the melodies are nice and atmospheric, but they simply lack the talent Evile is well known for, and the song will repeat riffs for extended periods of time. The daunting length may be enough to make Evile devotees drool, but for me it's poorly constructed; I can imagine the band sitting around in the recording studio saying "Okay, insert random riff here, play for a set amount of time, and then move on to the next riff. Repeat pattern for eleven minutes, and we have a song!"

There are definitely some shining moments throughout Infected Nations, and from what I've seen in youtube comments, the album seems to be considered better than Evile's debut. Not for me; Enter The Grave was an astounding peace of modern thrash that possessed all the bite of its influences without sounding like a copycat. But here, the band attempts to evolve into something more mature, just as their heroes did; too bad they didn't succeed in making a good album. This is very average modern thrash metal, and aside from the two fantastic songs I mentioned above, Infected Nations is a rather throwaway record as a whole, and I can barely even recall any of the riffs without listening to it again. Unfortunately, I have no motivation to do so.