### Achren: The forgotten king

#### 27/10/11 || Smalley

That album title makes you think of the disastrous last Cryptopsy, right? Fortunately, “The forgotten king” is much less offensive than that, though not really good; it’s an odd-duckling, with some black-toned rhythm guitar production, thrash/groove-ish riffs, old-school thrash-toned lead guitar, some melo death-y moments, some black-ish growling, and other vocals that straddle a midpoint in-between death-growling & hardcore shouted vocals. The thing is, blending a bunch of different sub-genres and influences together isn’t inherently bad at all; I love it when you get something you can’t straightforwardly classify like “To mega therion”, where the band does such a good job of blending different shit together that they transcend simple labels, and almost become their own unique genre.

But, if you can’t make that compelling, you just end up sounding like you don’t know what to do with your style, like Achren does; there are a few decent songs here, with some catchy guitar work, but for the most part, the riffs won’t stick with you, and the songwriting’s kind of disorganized, so all that genre-blending is ultimately for naught. Besides some mildly-annoying vox, this isn’t really bad at all in any way, but overall, it ain’t good at all either.

5/10: Tepid city.