As I was putting this cd into my cd player, only one thought was running through my head, "I hope it's as good as Symbolic". After listening the the opening track, Scavenger Of Human Sorrow, I knew that I would not be disappointed.

The band line up changed again for this album and is as follows:

Chuck Shuldiner - Guitar, Vocals
Richard Christy (Iced Earth) - Drums
Scott Clendenin - Bass
Shannon Hamm - Guitar

Death return after a lengthy 3 year rest with this amazingly technical, yet still quite brutal release. Following "Symbolic's" more technically driven edge, The Sound Of Perserverance was Death's last album and a highlight of Chuck Schuldiner's Career. Now onto the actual album. As i stated before, just from listening to the opening track, "Scavenger Of Human Sorrow", you can tell that this is going to be a great album. Following "Scavenger OF Human Sorrow", "Bite The Pain" is possibly the best song on the album, awesome riffing and soloing on Chuck's part. The next three songs, "Spirit Crusher", "Story To Tell" And "Flesh And The Power It Holds", are all extremely classy songs but are totally obliterated by "Voice Of The Soul". This song proves that Chuck Schuldiner is one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Never have I heard so much passion and emotion being put through just from a guitar solo, absolute magic. Trailing "Voice Of The Soul" comes the extremely technical and brutal "To Forgive Is To Suffer". The intro to this song is absoulutely amazing and shows Richard Christy's talent as a drummer. "A Moment Of Clarity" has much more groove to it than all the other songs on this album which are much more speed driven. This brings us finally to Death's rendidtion of Judas Priest's "Painkiller." Death's version of this song is absolutely spot on. Judas Priest, I think is one of those bands that is hard to cover because all their songs are perfect already. However, Death pull it off with a lot of style and even manage to add their own unique twists.

Overall, an awesome album that didn't score a perfect 100 because I felt that Richard Christy's playing was much too self-indulgent and did not flow with the music as well as it should have and some of the solos did not fit well into the songs.