Acod - Another Path

This French band are term their music as ‘blended metal’, the description is really accurate as you cannot pin this band down to one particular sub-genre. Death metal, groove metal and thrash metal, it’s all included and the vocals contribute to this music also. Clean, aggressive, growling vocals also tantalise your senses. There is nothing that any fan of extreme music wouldn’t find something to entertain them. Brief acoustic passages tie in with this modern metal sounding EP rather well, some of the clean vocals through ‘Unleash the Fools’ with a vocal tone that goes really emotive. Some quarters of the release have some real war like attritions to some current Swedish warriors then there are the twists and turns that even flavour some Behemoth and Krisiun pure death metal tantrums complete with a booking low end bass drum noise like that of the opener ‘Another Path’. ‘Black Wings’ has some monumental melodic guitar tones, in keeping with the likes of Amon Amarth solidifying that war like death metal approach I mentioned earlier.

‘Abuse Me’ is a hard hitting aspect of this release, the booming bass drum hits your ribcage like a juggernaut smashing into a compact family car at high speed, the guitar solos are cool but lose a bit of power as the rhythm section is all single chords sadly devoid of the bludgeoning hammer battalion that is present for the majority of the EP. Still, the art of capturing emotion with this power is pretty spectacular. The closer ‘Words of War’ really takes power and extremity to the limit of this release, the cries and screams from the vocals are the perfect accompaniment to this sound, the clean vocals sound a little off key, but the idea is matched with the bands intentional sturdy delivery via a massive production with the release being mastered at the Darth Mader Studio (owned by Logan Mader (ex-Machine Head guitarist and prolific album produced nowadays).

All in all, the blended metal tag works out well, there is a lot of talent here and ‘Another Path’ is a very enjoyable release that doesn’t follow the trends of recent releases. Acod up their game with this release that is a change of direction for the band, hence the release title, with a tantalising and very tempting presentation of years of extreme metal in all its various forms.


  1. Another Path 
  2. Black Wings 
  3. Unleash The Fools 
  4. Abuse Me 
  5. Words Of War

 


Self released
Reviewer: twansibon
Sep 10, 2014

Share this: