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A note to young bands: in general, spamming the message boards is not the best way to get a good review. And urgently spamming for reviews when your demo is already 2 years old is just silly. Even if you have a good demo, you are unlikely to get good reviews simply because you have irritated everyone in sight.

That said, I don't hate this demo nearly as much as I should. I must say I have never heard a combination of Doomdeath and Black Metal before, and if it was done well it would be very cool, but Cydonia have a lot of problems that will keep them from being a successful band. First: that vocalist, Brian whatever, he has to go. On the one hand we get some generically screechy BM vocals out of him. Those are not so bad, but his 'clean' vocals are terrible, amounting to nothing more than inane mutterings that sound like some pimply 16-year-old talking through the drive-through speaker. Spoken-word vocals are on extremely thin ice with me, and these go right through.

Second: tighten that shit up. These songs are all way too fucking long, and not for legitimate reasons. They are just bloated up with repetitive riffing that serves as a backdrop for the vocalist to mumble over. Dull. There is no excuse for that kind of wankery songwriting.

Third: GET RID OF THE HARDCORE SHIT. There are actually quite a few good riffs on this demo, but this band is all too prone to slacking back into chunky aggro riffs that sound like Machine Head or Prong. (In fact on "The Calling" they steal a Prong riff in its entirety.) When they are doing the doomy riffs or the faster tremolo stuff they sound pretty good, but then they lapse into Pantera-ripoff territory and the vocalist starts muttering about his headache or something and it goes all to shit. It doesn't help that the longest song here "This Mourning Forlorn" is a thirteen minute exercise in muttering, awful mallcore hollering, and tedious songwriting that will put you right to sleep.

I will depart from most of the reviews I have read and say I think these guys have potential. But right now they are too overloaded with pretension and crappy influences to be good, and too full of themselves to see it. The first few songs here are pretty good, but by track 4 I was struggling to stay awake. And by the time we reach track 5 – which is nothing but 6 minutes of soundclips and samples - I was growling "what the fuck is this?" and reaching for the skip button. Pretension piles on pretension, and by the end what started as a Black Metal disc with some doomy influence has degenerated into utter shit.

Despite some potential in the riff department, this generally sucks. And I will have to counsel most people to avoid it. Cydonia (terrible name, and one that's already taken besides. Get a new one.) may become something interesting in the future, but for now they are just a mess without a clear idea of what's good, or what they even want to be.