One of the fastest working bands I’ve ever witnessed backed up by one of my personal favorite vocalists of all time makes for the ultimate combination when it comes to a band. With an extensive touring track record and their now sixth release as a band, it’s no wonder they’re constantly growing in popularity as each day passes and only have the best going for them in the future. This is Pathology.
Only being created back in 2006 by founding drummer Dave Astor who has had previous stints with Cattle Decapitation and The Locust, it’s pretty overwhelming that Pathology has managed to push out four albums on three different record labels as well as a demo in such a short amount of time. The band clearly has no intentions of stopping as they’ve just released, as of today, their 6th album; third via Victory Records entitled The Time Of Great Purification. Pathology has always been an amazing mixture of brutal death metal mixed with elements of slam and this release is exactly that.
After jamming to the album several times I had a mixture of emotions on top of the fact that I was half falling asleep. The falling asleep part isn’t a diss to the band, there’s just something about Pathology’s sound that relaxes me to no end. I could seriously jam all of their music and it would probably relax me to such an extent that I would fall asleep. Aside from that, it’s exactly what I was expecting from them which was pure brutality in the form of gutteral vocals and immensely fast high and low vocals provided by Jonathon Huber. Jon has always been one of my favorite vocalists since I got into the ‘core’ and metal genre years and years ago. I found his vocals to be so strong and unbeatable when it came to the brutal death genre. After listening to The Time Of Great Purification, I was convinced I was right all along.
Backing up Jon’s insane vocals is non-stop drumming provided by Dave Astor. It blows my mind to even think about how he can drum as fast as he does to keep up with the vocals and racing guitar throughout the entire album. My only complaint about the album and Pathology in general is that it’s just so hard to create a really memorable album in this genre. I absolutely adore the brutality and always will but I find it hard to want to come back to albums of this style and want to consistently jam them without having to force myself to. When I do listen to them, I love everything they provide but there’s just no real “catch & keep” aspect of this album. Fortunately for the band, I do have plans to keep the entire album on my iPod because out of all of their releases, I am the most impressed with this one and feel that maybe with time I will grow to love it as much as I have loved every other thing that Jon has been involved with. Definite props to the songs “Tyrannical Decay” and “Corporate Harvest” because I feel like those are the strongest, heaviest, and most technical songs on the album. There’s something about those two that had me hooked immediately when I went through the album for the first time. The four boys in Pathology have provided us with just over half an hour of pure baby crushingingly heavy death metal and for that I have the utmost thankfulness.
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