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Malice Divine are a new project from guitarist Ric Galvez, who's spent years playing in local bands in the Toronto scene and even has a formal background in music. Unsurprisingly, his self-titled debut is a very guitar-centric slab of Black/Death that sounds like a mixture of Dissection's melodic sensibility with Skeletonwitch's relentless energy. The playing is as sharp and precise as you'd expect it to be, and some of the leads are really superior, but the songs tend to be a pile of riffs that don't always come together in a coherent manner. The compositions can also stretch themselves thin as they try to contain them all, and this isn't helped by most of them passing the 5-minute mark, some even hitting 8 or 9 minutes. There are flashes of excellence to be found in here, particularly on "Into Subconscious Depths" and album closer "The Transcendence of Isolation", but those moments are surrounded by disjointed songwriting that doesn't always know when to quit. A solid debut, but the band could tighten themselves up a bit.