Chromatic Dark
Inhuman Conviction
6.5
This killer lil' slab of Finnish attitude landed in my ears smack-dab in the thick of a re-ignition for the brutal and simplistic. Lucky for it, I've been on Illdisposed and Hackneyed kicks as of late, and Chromatic Dark's short-stack makes sense in this grand scheme of all things no-frills, heavy hammering, and weighty.
With only about fourteen minutes to get their story straight, this quintet via Oulu do an admirable job of driving the point home that eight years and only a handful of demos were eventually going to add up to something. Amped up and well-prepped to do good by the modern, shinily produced, and straight ahead, Inhuman Conviction clears the lane with its hair-trigger riffing and no-brainer approach. The Chromatic definitive track, "Payback", while leaving much to be desired in the song-titling department, makes a case for the DM niche that is forever halfway-to-Heartwork, but stays classy about it. And I mean quite literally that Inhuman, as a whole, aims to get to the heartwork of it, as the climbs up the fretboard often resemble an Amott & Steer approach to the crunch and crawl across the strings. The whole of this EP is solid, forthright, and unabashedly follows in the footsteps of those who walked tall and cast shadows.
There's enough variation here to warrant a bit of curiosity about what it is that Chromatic Dark will do next. While their porkchop approach to Death Metal will probably not earn them 'classic' status, or even 'mainstay' for the time being, they're well on their way to riding high that middle ground where bands know their place, and then continue to pound down their mark on this world.
