You don’t get too many bands from Kuala Lumpur, so it’s probably worth seeing past the completely forgettable artwork and song titles to unearth a bit of a rarity. What we have here is a breed of death metal which probably would have been acceptable in the early nineties, but the production especially holds this one back, coming across as Suffocation playing underwater, or perhaps from a live video feed from Malaysia. Everything is so badly mixed, it very almost works, but for a band that started last year, we should really expect a bit more.

 The quality of the songwriting is in itself not bad on this fifteen minute EP; there are some fairly brutal double bass drum-laden passages, infused with some neat  guitar riffs, which for all the bad production can be made out reasonably. The band are at their best when they hang on to a catchy thrash riff, although this gets a little too Pantera ‘Walk’-like on the song ‘Blood Legion’. Shan’s vocals are impressively guttural, especially when you consider that there probably aren’t any effects given the low production values on this release. A band with many bright ideas, and a good head for writing a mean death metal song, but the production definitely makes ‘Exsanguination’ suffer a little.

7