Doomsday X

Few are the death metal bands (or any sort of band, for that matter) whose career has survived beyond a handful of releases, and so Malevolent Creation's arrival at a tenth studio album, via 2007's Doomsday X, might be viewed as cause for celebration, even before the first note gets played. The fact that this note, and the tens of thousands that follow thereafter like clouds of ravaging locusts, are assembled into 12 largely captivating death/thrash metal numbers, is therefore an added bonus. Of course it was anything but an easy road to this point; numerous musicians joined and left Malevolent Creation over the years, and it's no small feat that the band's lone full-time member, guitarist Phil Fasciana, has managed to reunite four/fifths of the classic Stillborn album lineup (all but drummer Alex Marquez) for the first time in over a decade. Time has done nothing to deteriorate their combustible internal chemistry, either, and bruising album highlights like "Deliver My Enemy," "Buried in a Nameless Grave" and "Prelude to Doomsday" remain stylistically true to the group's thrash-infused brand of early death metal, while sounding remarkably relevant by new millennium standards of added brutality. All this being said, Malevolent Creation still lack that unique and undisputed element of greatness displayed by the death metal genre's first generation elite (Sepultura, Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary), so it's almost impossible to imagine this material achieving metallic immortality, no matter how exciting they may sound in the moment. But for fans unconcerned with such subjective comparisons, and an overriding sense of the "now," Doomsday X provides thoroughly entertaining death metal, and another worthy chapter to the Malevolent Creation story. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia