This Nightmare is a short, but sweet little EP from Denver's Cryogen, with six tracks clocking in at a succinct 21 minutes. Some bands will try to pass that off as a full-length, or worse yet, add an acoustic intro, two noise interludes, and an unnecessarily long closing track to give the album a more respectable run time. Here however, we are greeted with a crisp, modern melodic death/metalcore EP basically free of any filler, so the band definitely makes the best of the short run time. Besides, I'll take something like this over a record full of filler any day.

Cryogen aren't an entirely original group, though their take on melodic metal makes it difficult to come up with easy, obvious comparisons. They cover a good amount of territory despite the brevity of the release, including bouncy metalcore-ish leads ("This Nightmare" and "Fail to Exist"), techy thrashers ("The Pain We Endure"), and mid-paced chord-based melody ("Man Is War"). The writing isn't anything spectacular, though most of their breaks and bridges are well placed and sound completely natural with the flow of the songs. I'd really like to see the band incorporate more speed in their sound as the mid-paced songs tend to get a bit monotonous and drag a bit compared to their more energetic material.

Though the songwriting is solid and consistent, the band does absolutely nothing new and even the band itself doesn't sound very excited about what they are doing, so why should we be? I like Cryogen's versatility, but considering they can barely hold my attention through 21 minutes, I'm not too impressed with this EP.