DISKREET

Innovative? No. Intense? Hell fucking yeah. Meet the new kids on the American death metal block, from Topeka, Kansas. Okay, I guess technically we should split hairs and call them “death core" or give them some equally meaningless semantic label. After all, they do have breakdowns, and for all I know, they may have short hair.

But just for a minute, how about we put down the thesaurus and rock? DISKREET clearly worship at the altar of DYING FETUS, to the point where they oughta put a quarter in a jar for John Gallagher every time they do one of those sweeping arpeggios. They also have a handle on their SUFFOCATION, RED CHORD, ORIGIN and DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN influences, and the occasional moment of thrash fury or black metal grandeur. There's even movie samples between tracks, seemingly there just to enforce the fact that we've all been down this road before.

But while DISKREET (man, that's a bad name — I mean, really) don't reinvent the wheel, they pack a lot of livin' into this short, sharp burst of metal. There's a clarity here, both in the production (a little more rough and "live" sounding, and less processed, than the new FETUS) and in the songwriting. These guys already have that instinctive knack for welding together all the parts so that the fast bits have maximum face-ripping impact, while the breakdowns truly destroy, with nothing overstaying its welcome or getting lost in monotony. There's an intensity to their performances, too — the riffs are vicious, and the drummer likes to throw in the occasional little "hypberblast" moment in slow parts, just to keep the slow parts off-balance. And talk about a flair for the dramatic — check out the two-minute mark in "Faust", where a frantic, swelling blast part is offset by several seconds of acoustic guitar just to make it hit that much harder. Excellent!

At the end of the day, DISKREET aren't truly essential — if anything, they're really good imitators at this stage, wearing their brutal influences proudly on their tattered sleeves. But when you're this good, this early, we can't help but expect great things. Get this low-priced EP now and make sure DISKREET stays on your radar, because this might be the next big thing.