Review at Lords Of Metal Magazine

In our issue number 81 we already met with Thy Final Pain, with their then current work ‘Epitaph’. I therein confirmed that they play “massive rhythmic death metal”, their own description accordingly. I also wrote that the band is kept going by a duo (Marc Jüttner and Simon Dorn, previously of Debauchery), which hasn’t changed either. Live they added Sascha Weber on guitar and Lukas Nicol onto their ranks. Could be quite tacky right, playing metal live, without a drummer. What has changed: they have a record deal. Considering that factor, it is even more surprising that they send me a recordable disk, with their album on it. Why not just send in a re-recordable? Once you only do it half, make sure someone else will have some purpose of it. But when I am totally honest, I already do, because as a whole, it is not that bad. At least I detect slight progression, although the production doesn’t knock me out of my seat. But let me stress out that I hear this album along with the new God Dethroned.
A thing that does stir me, is the intro of the song ‘A Bullet For Reincarnation’. A heavily breathing man, his breath fades, a gun is loaded through, his breathing accelerates, the shot rings. The breathing stops and the music starts. Perfectly timed, I can’t say anything else about it. One of the very few times in a recent history that someone comes up with something that grabs me, really. Brilliant opening sequence, guys! The titlesong ‘Of Life And Death’ has all the right to be so. Although I heard this album five times now, thanks to a severe traffic jam, I could sing along with the chorus of this song after one quarter of it already. This doesn’t make it the best song, from my perspective that honour goes to ‘Bloodsaturated Perpetuity’. I must admit that this a song that takes a little longer to grow on you, though.
Something you get used to too easily, is the pitch shifted grunt. Their music is actually a bit too friendly for such a dramatic sound in the voice. But this is one of my heaviest and very few remarks. Muscle show-off like that is not strange to singer Simon, I think he gets addressed about it without playing music too, as he clearly spends more than just one hour a week with sporting activities. That built up fitness will come in handy, as their agenda starts to fill up by drops. Now all they got to do is take a deep breath and step over the linguistic borders, if necessary with some financial risk, because there is a whole market outside the German language barriers. Just like the last time they were on our e-zine I would recommend to at least enclose an English section with the promotional material. The mere fact that there are about three hundred million people out there that speak German, still means that there are about six and a half billion people out there that don´t.