TERROR OF THE COSMOS

The last post I made about Dublin's ZOM was more than a year ago when I spoke about their debut demo tape. Since then the band released another three songs in the form of another cassette in limited numbers for Hell's Pleasure Fest last year (never got a copy, somebody help me out), and now we've been cursed with their debut s/t EP pressed by Iron Bonehead. Two tracks that I (and I would assume that most) hadn't heard until now, but they both originally appeared on the previously mentioned limited cassette. With this record it seems that the band have certainly settled firmly into their purist death metal approach. All remnants and hints of members previous hardcore inclined projects are nothing more than a memory now, though I wouldn't necessarily say that that's such a good thing. Yes the recording on this thing is noticeably better quality than the demo, and Andy's vocals are drowned in even more reverb than before, but the stuff here just doesn't quite offer the hardcore punch that I enjoyed in earlier material. I also suspect that the reverb is used to mask the fact that Andy doesn't quite posses the chops vocally to front a big death metal band. Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy this, it's a great example of a modern approach to old sounding metal, I just suspect that if the band's members hadn't already set such a high bench mark with previous groups I would probably like this a lot more. It's possibly also got something to do with the fact that years of hardcore has ruined my attention span for the vast majority of dense music like this. It's only two songs though, who knows what a whole LP could bring.