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Always an odd commodity when they get around to releasing a record, Canadian progsters Into Eternity unleashed one awesome album in the form of 2004's Buried in Oblivion, but sadly the band haven't been able to reach that same level of sophisticated insanity ever since, with their modern endeavors sounding far too desultory, and, dare I say it: commercial. This, their fifth album to date, is a hell of an improvement on 2006's awful The Scattering of Ashes, but the band's uniquely extreme take on Progressive Power Metal often gets in the way of making The Incurable Tragedy a strong innovation on the genre, which at times just comes across as bland and hackneyed, instead of the smooth transition between Death Metal and Prog-Power that Into Eternity believe they have perfected.

Mixing the highly technical with the extremely brutal, tracks like "Diagnosis Terminal" and "Tides of Blood" determine Into Eternity's mindset, sounding like a heady mix of Zero Hour, Dream Evil, and Atheist, but things are a tad aimless as a whole to make it truly enjoyable, and while the clean choruses are as catchy as ever, and the playing is uniformly killer, this could have been so much better had they approached it with the same fortitude as 2004's crowning achievement. Shame.