Metal Underground.com

Like their fellow Swiss metal brethren in Samael, the cogs that make up the Sybreed machine mix a variety of industrial and non-metal sounds into the music to push the boundaries and offer a wider look at what can constitute “heavy metal.” The band’s latest album, “God is an Automaton,” is a slick piece of interconnected parts that may seem to be working in opposite directions at first, but end up smoothly grinding a listener’s ears with both heaviness and melody.

The whole album has a lot of serious groove going on, which offers something besides just brutality to make the tracks musically interesting. Some have referred to “God is an Automaton” as a “pop-influenced” effort, but honestly that’s taking the comparisons much too far. There are plenty of electronic elements and quite a bit of a hard rock mentality, but it’s still easily an extreme metal album at heart. “Industrial metal” is probably the best term to describe these 11 tracks, but there’s a strong balance between those two opposite sides that doesn’t get heavily skewed in one direction or another for long, like a melodic death metal version of Blacklodge.

In addition to the expected growls, a fair amount of melodic clean singing provides a well-rounded feel to the album, especially as the clean parts vary in range considerably across the disc. For the most part, it works and doesn’t detract from the heaviness, although in a few limited instances, they do approach that unfortunately whiny sound that brings to mind the avalanche of copy/paste mallcore bands out there.

The metalverse needs bands like Sybreed, who can be relied on to churn out something a little outside the norm that combines different ideas together, instead of remaining pure to one specific genre. When a non-stop death or black metal experience isn’t appealing, but something that’s all groove or rock isn’t right either, “God is an Automaton” fits the bill perfectly.