When you see the artwork of the cover, it makes you think of winter, cold woods, piercing gusts of wind that slowly create icicles in your eyelashes and eyebrows. Terrified of freezing your face you pay no attention to where you walk, so you trip over a frozen branch, which makes you fall to the frozen ground, which makes you cut open your knee on the edge of a frozen rock. They told me this was power metal, but with power metal I think of battles in the middle ages, swords and castles, so this could not be.

Indeed Fragments Of Unbecoming (FOU) do not make power metal. Their creations are called melodic death metal. FOU is from Germany and they formed in the year 2000. First they started as a project of Mortified guitarist Sascha Ehrich and Venereal Disease guitarist Stefan Weimar, who would also do the vocals. Quickly it became more than a project. Ehrich quit Mortified and concentrated on FOU, bringing in Ingo Maier as a drummer and bassist Wolfram Schellenberg to complete the line-up. Their inspiration is (mostly) the Swedish death metal scene. They released a mini CD - Chapter I - in 2002 and ‘Skywards, chapter II, A Sylphe’s Ascension’ is their full-length debut album.

The CD starts off with a powerful song that has a title too long to name. Power metal like riffing, but faster, with lower and slightly higher pitched grunts. The drums are double-bassed, which is nice, but then all of a sudden, they go into this death metal thing of just really fast banging on the snare drum, something I do not really appreciate. This keeps reoccurring throughout the CD, but only a couple of times per song, so it is endurable.

Instrumentally they are very good. There are lots of variations of rhythms and many different parts in each song, which keeps the album interesting. Furthermore there are multiple changes of pace in the songs, also a good feature, reminding me of Dutch thrashers Outburst.

One thing that I do miss are solo’s. They play guitar very well, so why not put in some solo’s? They can add power to the message you are trying to get across in your music.

The vocals are somewhere in between grunting and screaming. Stefan Weimar doesn’t really grunt as guttural as they usually do in death metal, for you can still make out lyrics. Take death metal grunts, mix it with Dave Grohl’s screaming voice and Skinlab’s grunting, and the outcome will be Stefan Weimar. That’s all well and good, however, he does not really have a great voice. It’s all right for six or seven songs, but then you feel you’ve had enough, and I believe that the biggest factor in that are the vocals.

The production of Skywards, chapter II, A Sylphe’s Ascension - remember to breath when you read that aloud - is mediocre. Too mediocre. Especially the sound of the drums does not sound good. It is as though they recorded in a bunker, there is no echo. If the band would be playing two feet away from you stand, you would not hear them. The music doesn’t spread around; it has no reach. That’s very strange, it makes the music sound hollow.

In conclusion this album, ScIIASA, if you wish to abbreviate, is hard for me to judge. The genre isn’t really my cup of tea, but in spite of that, I do like the album. It’s a mix between thrash metal, death metal, and a bit of power metal. So, if you like at least two of those three genres, you will probably find this all right as well. However, I feel not many people will pick this as their album of the year, for its production is not good enough, the vocals not powerful enough, and there aren’t any features that stand out. Still, for a debut album, it holds some promise.

P.S. My next review will be shorter, I promise.