While I was sniffing around for some death metal to get my filthy hands on, I came across some fairly interesting stuff including Arch Enemy’slightly more technical sibling Coram Lethe. Why Arch Enemy you ask? Well, the vocal-duties here are handled by female growler Erica Puddu. And well, while little if anything separates her from Angela Gossow in terms of style, the music here is slightly different although it’s clearly headed in the same direction. Even though this is melodic, the technical outbursts here are many in numbers. While technicality does not in any way equal great or emotive music, these guys manage to keep their skill tied to a neutral level, meaning you will not be bored out of your mind with lengthy solo’s or confusing twists and turns, but hopefully and quite on the contrary, you will probably be positively surprised. Leonardo Fusi and Filippo Occhipinti churn out riffs varying between fast and intense anger-ridden chugs, furious palm muting, neat octave-coloured melodic passages and some swift atmospheric stuff. With a lovely touch of melodic death metal added to it, they carry the entire machinery. There are however a small thing bothering me a little though. The guitar-solos are very few and very far between, and as the ones put on display here are very good, the overall total lack of killer leads is clearly noticeable, as the sometimes much needed break from the all the neck-wrecking music is omitted.

Mix Arch Enemy with later Death and voila, you have Coram Lethe. Erica Puddu is often hailed as the unknown twin-sister of Chuck Schuldiner. Although I didn’t recognize her as that when I was first exposed to this, I definitely hear some of the same edge in the higher registers of her screams, which are surprisingly controlled and handled extremely well. She handles deep grunts just as nicely as she performs the tortured high-pitched screams of hers. In addition to that, she’s able to mix the two into a gory bowl of raw snarls that’ll make you shudder just a little. There are however, despite the fact that this is pretty damn good, some down-sides to this. Even though they manage to vary this to a certain extent, the spark is slowly fading from the middle and through to the end. Even though the glimpses of greatness and incredible potential are spread all over, they do get lost in their own excitement and slight wish to show off skills. I know I mentioned earlier that this isn’t complete overkill; however, I believe that more variety is necessary to please the average death metal fan, and they fall an inch short of succeeding on that matter. This is nonetheless a pretty damn solid album, which I enjoy when I put it on once in a while. Nothing bad nor anything particularly spectacular about this. This is basically an enjoyable listen that’ll probably do more for some, and less for others. A bottom line would be that this is a stellar slab of technical melodic death metal that fans of the mentioned Arch Enemy with a hint of technicality should look into.