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With a band name like this, my first reaction was that this would probably be something experimental or avant-garde or what have you, but in fact The Shiva Hypothesis play blackened death metal in the same vein as bands with names that, shall we say, match the genre a little more. Brutal, heavy, kind of raw but not too much, and a savage vocal delivery result in a blackened death that has nothing to envy most other bands in the genre. There are slower, more atmospheric and melodic passages here and there, sometimes punctuated by clean vocals that are fine, but really don't bring much to the table and that I found a little distracting (the great harsh vocals are really where it's at). Nothing especially new here, as it's in the vein of Scandinavian black and black/death from the late '90s and early 2000s, but it's well executed.