CIANIDE United States Death/Doom Metal

Apart from it just kicking ass aplenty, a big part of why I find this album so enjoyable is that it's hard for me to listen to it without comparing it to the aforementioned Monotheist. The similarity in guitar tone and overall production, paired with Cianide's clear musical debt to Celtic Frost/Hellhammer, makes this something of a companion album to that grand but ultimately disappointing experiment, one with a much less ambitious goal but one which it accomplishes with ferocious success. That the band was so perfectly able to answer that "what if" scenario I painted at the beginning of this review speaks not only to their abilities as musicians but also right to my amygdala or whatever part of your brain that makes you just want to listen to smash-everything riffs and wake up sore and happy the next day. So if, like me, you've listened to Monotheist a whole bunch of times and fairly often you were left wondering "yeah ok, but why aren't there more and better RIFFS?" then I can't really recommend this album enough.