Thankfully, any perceived difficulty in this change has been neatly blown away. They couldn't have done it better if they'd given such conceptions until the count of ten to get their ugly, yellow, no-good keister off of their property, before they pumped their guts full of lead (all right Johhny, I'm sorry, I'm goin'!). The band achieves this via a suite of thirteen songs, most of which hearken back to their second album, 'Lullabies For The Dormant Mind' (which for the record, you should own, and if you don't shame on you). There are also nods to their more progressive third disc, 'Prisoners'.
From an instrumental and production standpoint, the album certainly has an edge over the last release. My main complaint with Prisoners was that the drums sounded like mud when they got fast. Not this time. Every hit is clear and defined. Every note on the guitars comes clearly through a haze of biting distortion, whilst the bass is very much audible, biting and snapping in the mix. It's perhaps the most aggressive work of the band to date, though not quite so busy sonically as Lullabies is (keyboards and samples are notable by their general absence).
The vocals will be what most people focus on, as this is where the member change has happened - Alissa White-Gluz is now out, and Vicky Psarakis is in (though this is pretty old news, to be honest). The most notable difference is that Vicky's growls and screams have a throatier bite to them, perhaps being more rooted in traditional death metal vocals, and being somewhat lower in pitch overall. Her melodic passages are well constructed and catchy without the songs having to rely on them (as some bands are wont to do). The most notable difference is that her lyrics are relatively straightforward, in comparison to AWG's. This isn't necessarily a negative point, though, being that AWG's lyrics had always been, in essence, very complex poetry.
My criticisms come primarily from the tracklisting. The first nine tracks rip and tear like an enraged honey badger, and then we have a cluster of more gentle songs, interspersed with the album's heaviest track. It would have perhaps been a more even pace if the gentler numbers had been spaced more evenly through the album's hour-long runtime, but it's a very minor quibble overall. We may have a contender for album of the year 2015 already...
9.5/10
