Metal Underground.com

I've never understood the appeal of death & roll. It's always seemed to me to be growling or screaming layered over a fairly mainstream hard rock sound in order to gain a sense of commercial acceptance from a general public that will never get into the music simply because of the vocals or an underground scene that demands chops and dislikes traditional song structures. To be frank, death & roll has a very small target audience that lies somewhere between the mainstream and underground, but don't appear to belong to either.

Bride of the Monster is both better and worse than the standard death and roll band. For one thing, the drummer is good in a way similar to Tommy Stewart from the first two Godsmack albums. He's clearly too talented for the type of music he's playing and he shows it while still keeping time for the band.

As far as guitars go, their lead guitarist can certainly shred and the band writes some good riffs, but he's held back by a band that tries to fit itself into too small of a cage when it's grown to a size that's simply too large to still dwell in it. The vocalist tries to do his best Jamey Jasta impersonation, which in a sense makes the music sound like it could be mistaken for deathcore by somebody who's unfamiliar with metal.

In terms of production, "A Slaughter of Biblical Proportions" is proof of why most underground metal albums choose to mute the bass. All throughout listening to this, I was plagued by a rattling sound in the background that is simply migraine inducing, making me wonder why the bass tracks were included at all given the low production values and horrible click-y drum sound.

The end result is that the rhythm second sounds like a rattling cage, but without the sense of atmosphere to make that sound work. This, combined with the hardcore vocals and rock song structures, makes some of the well thought out guitar ideas on "A Slaughter of Biblical Proportions" easily ignored, especially since many of the riffs would fit into a traditional hard rock album, if not a Hellyeah album.

In short, this band's individual members all have potential to develop as musicians, but not within the context of this band. Thankfully, they still have the opportunity to disband while they remain unsigned.