You know, the nice thing about being a reviewer is the fact that you sometimes receive CDs or promos from bands you’ve never heard of. Lifend is a good example of a band I have never heard of. The promotional flyer that came along with the album tells me that the band comes from Italy. I don’t know if it’s me, but when I think of Italian metal I always think of Rhapsody or Lacuna Coil. Well, for those of you who think that Lifend may be a mix between those bands, I’m sorry... it’s not.

Lifend likes to promote itself as a melodic and avant-garde death metal band with female vocals and a brutal death grunt. Now, I have no problems with a grunt or with female vocals, when they both take the music to a higher level that is.

And in my opinion the female vocals (done by Sara) and the grunts (done by Roberto) don’t take the music to a higher level. It even sounds pretty chaotic to me.

And musically? Well, it is pretty original I guess. I mean, you don’t hear a saxophone in various kinds of metal these days do you? Anyway, the music is pretty layered and sometimes it sounds very chaotic. By that I mean that both guitars play a different riff or lick, the drums are varying between blasting and laid back drumming and the keyboards sound like DJ Tiësto. Sometimes it’s simply too much.