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Where do I start with Slime Abyss from Madison, Wisconsin's Tubal Cain? From the cover and album title you might guess death metal, but then you hit play and what hits you is raspy black vocals (both male and female) over sometimes thrashy, sometimes doomy traditional metal riffing. It isn't a sound you hear often and it takes me back to the '80s, before the second wave of black metal when the genre was more about the lyrics and attitude than the music. Venom's thrash metal, Mercyful Fate's heavy/power metal and even Manowar's epic "Bridge of Death" were all lumped into "black" metal and that's kind of what Tubal Cain's blend of black vocals and more traditional songwriting and playing reminds me of. The songs on Slime Abyss are good, though nothing that strikes me as great or sticks around for very long after the album ends, but as a whole it is good enough and different enough from everything else that I really like it. If you've been riding the black/thrash wave for a while now and want something different, Tubal Cain is a band to check out.