Thanatos - Justified Genocide (2009)^{Release ID: 13761}

Thanatos landed on my radar earlier last year after I listened to their superb Emerging From the Netherworlds album. The Dutch deathsters managed to put together a decent run of albums over their first three releases and despite an eight year gap between their sophomore and their third release, Angelic Encounters was a fucking blast.  Sadly the band went a little off the boil for me with Undead. Unholy. Divine and this lull carried into 2009's Justified Genocide.

Although not terrible as such, album number five from the band is a tired sounding affair that regurgitates the same rhythms and riffs over and over leaving you feel trapped in a maze of torment that even Morbid Angel would want out of.  The combination of death metal and thrash metal somehow leaves for an exhausted sounding experience with the band seemingly unable to get themselves out of a rut of over-used ideas that no matter how hard you flog them just won't provide entertainment.

The result is an album that spasms with the occasional throes of life only to soon be overwhelmed by it's own repetition and lack of invention to then soon find itself in some humdrum existence that just lurches on and on.  Broken up only by a half-decent cover of Massacre's Dawn of Eternity the album otherwise just passes me by.  The album is raw and crunchy sounding but this doen't give it any cult sheen and it just sounds like a band trying to mask their innovation starved songs by hoping some good ol' fashioned brutal riffing will get them by.  It doesn't.