Humanity's Last Breath – Humanity's Last Breath

September 24, 2013 • Rogue Records

Djent is the kind of genre that you don't really expect to ever develop much, aside from blatant and uninteresting fusion with other genres that almost always wind up being awful. And so I haven't really listened to any of it much lately (aside from the newer Meshuggah albums, and then only a little bit, because they're really not that good anymore). Of course that leaves me with missing out on a lot, as it turns out. Not that Humanity's Last Breath is really bringing something phenomenal or super-innovative or anything—but they do make a pretty good album.

All the standards are here: grinding muted guitar riffs downtuned at least an octave (and no bass, I'm pretty sure), robotic polyrhythmic drumming, devastating growled vocals. Surprisingly, for a band employing a style that's largely repetitive (and based around repetition), these guys switch things up a lot and they manage to strike just the right balance between establishing a solid rhythm or guitar line and then moving around enough to keep the listener engaged. I still can't tell the individual songs apart, but I find that I can skip around to just about anywhere in the album and something interesting will be going on.

A good deal of the album sounds a little bit deathcore-ish as well (I guess there's that fusion thing I mentioned earlier), but they definitely do it much better than it could have been were they a bit sloppier about things. There are lots of interesting parts where the music is very sparse, with slowly-played drum lines and riffs that jump all over the place, which feels a inspired by deathcore breakdowns—though here it's definitely done a lot more tastefully. The atmosphere also manages to have this sort of spacey industrial feel to it, without there really being any industrial metal present; maybe it's the mixing.

I guess in at least that sense Humanity's Last Breath sounds quite a bit fresher than (say) Meshuggah, though I hesitate to recommend them to just anyone as their style is probably going to inherently turn away a lot of people. If that's the case it's a bit disappointing as I think they do a surprisingly good job at it; it could definitely have been a lot worse. There's just a lot of amazingly fun riffage to dig into, and if you can get into that, this album is definitely worth checking out.