Metal Underground.com

From the heartland of Kansas comes Topeka's Diskreet, bringing their own signature variety of melodic death thrash to a scene already proliferated with a surfeit of bands. "Engage the Mechanicality" is certainly a worthy effort, as the musicians in the band have a good degree of accomplishment and capture the overall sound that is crucial to death metal - brutality and precision.

Diskreet starts off with an instrumental snippet, "Engage," and then plows into ten more tracks of controlled mayhem. "We Are Legion" has good layering of drums and guitar leads that enhance the overall caustic nature of the track, reminding me of the precision of Nile. "The Fall of Mankind" follows a slightly slower pace and breaks down into a nice steady skank beat toward the middle. In tracks like "Serpents Tongue," they display their penchant for winding guitar leads and artillery-fueled drumming, combined with melodic flourishes throughout the middle. "Haunt of Fear" is also noteworthy as the fastest track with insane drumming that gives way to a nicely done guitar outro. The nice crushing beat of "Valley of Kings" makes for good listening with its slower melodic guitar segment.

The thing with writing good music is that you can have all the ingredients for a solid band, but somehow, the result is far from stellar if they are not combined right. That is the quandary with Diskreet's new album. "Engage the Mechanicality" gets mired in redundancy, the technical prowess falling flat when the same formula is adhered to over and over. The thrashing leads and rhythm take the same course through "Bishop of War" and "Spinal Cord Collection," getting boggled down into the realm of assembly line metal.

If it were changed up more often, especially in regards to the vocals, the tracks would be more memorable. Songs like "Graves" alternate between screaming and barking, which gets old really fast. They need to do more to create distinct song entities or their album will fall into the oblivion of one's memory. After a while, the occasional movie clip intros were the only point of distinction between the tracks.

Diskreet possess the chops to be a decent technical death thrash band if they would only concentrate on their songwriting. "Engage the Mechanicality" needed to do a lot more in terms of innovation to keep the tracks from being virtual clones of each other.