Finland's All, a band whose ph:ALL-us demo was released this year, greets a metal scene that has grown unhealthy from mallcore bands and other scene groups trying to pass off their terrible music as metal. Fortunately, All has set out to undo the mistakes of these bands, one demo at a time.

The demo ph:ALL-us starts off with an introduction song; a good one, not a crappy sample from a third-rate movie, nor an extended synthesized melody to distract us from the music itself. No, it's an interesting little piece that sets the stage for what the music actually is: Egyptian-themed metal (in a totally different way from Nile). And sure enough, when "Logos Sun-Therion" starts playing, the tremolo picking, drum machine and death metal vocals place you right inside Cairo's bustling marketplace circa 3500 B.C.

This demo tears by at a quick pace; the mixture of almost black metal guitar riffs, old school death metal vocals, a drum machine that might have been used by a goregrind band, and a large amount of thrash influence is enough to confuse anyone trying to pin this band down to one genre. Either this is their sound, or they're just trying different stuff to see if it works. For me, it definitely does.

With production values this high, the full-length should be interesting.



Vaughn Fortier-Shultz is a sophomore
at Academy for Technology and the Classics. You can reach him at moosemanxl@gmail.com.