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Sulphur Aeon started out in a blast of Death Metal mastery that is hard to measure up to. In just a two-year period they opened up with the crushing heaviness and savagery of Swallowed by the Ocean's Tide and then followed that with the technical, intricate, and ruthless Gateway to the Antisphere. I found their third album to be a disappointment, as The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos was slower, mellower, and less heavy than what I wanted from this band. Now, with their fourth album, this band continues to go in a more experimental direction, and I have decidedly mixed feelings about it.

This is still a band of enormous ambition and impressive musical ability, wringing out complex and haunting riffs in between passages that will pummel you as flat as anything ever has. Drummer Dan Dickmann, in particular, just blows me away with the heaviness and aggression of his playing. But the thrust of this album is in a much more melodic and offbeat direction than just raging Death Metal. Make no mistake, when this band lays it down, it flattens everything in sight, but the song structures are weird and sometimes meander far too much, and just when you want them to really rip your face off, they instead detour off into another odd interlude with lurching time signatures and moody riffs. I have to salute the sheer ambition and ability on display here, the definite desire to make something that is not just another Death Metal album, but this is an album that spends too much time playing variations and not enough theme, so often the songs are over and you still feel like they never really got started. I love their bizarre sense of composition and their ace sense of melody, I just want them to kick more ass.