This is a momentous occasion, don’t zap away. ‘This Violent Decline’ is the new album of Belgian heavy/thrash metal outfit After All, and it is fucking awesome. One would expect metalcore from a band named After All, but (luckily) no, this is thrash / heavy metal played to the finest. I will explain in the following paragraphs why ‘This Violent Decline’ is one of the best metal albums of the year. Did I just state that? I guess I did.

This record contains brilliant riffs, great drums and the best vocals I have ever heard in thrash or heavy metal. It seems as though After All recorded the songs on this album whilst having their most inspired time ever. Every song clicks at some point, certain points or all the way. At times you’ll have your regular thrash metal parts, you know, fast drums, fast riffs you all heard before, but combined with all the awesomeness that is going on around these bits, it doesn’t matter. Maybe without these standard thrash bits, the music would have too much awesomeness, so your ears and brain would not be able to define great from awful anymore. Also, these typical thrash fractions don’t take long, I guess that helps as well. What I’m trying to say is: this band has found the nearly perfect combination of melody, aggression, catchy hooks, and awesomely timed, very powerful vocals, sung with incredible conviction, it just makes for such a great album, and such magnificent stand-alone songs, your whole body enjoys the music. Okay, that sounds a bit odd, but I mean it in a socially acceptable way.

Or whatever.
Songs like ‘Violent Decline’, ‘Without Reason’ and ‘The Harlot’ are just a couple of examples of how this type of music should sound. That sound of course, in this case hugely benefits from the grand production. The band did this themselves, with mixing help from Fredrik Nordstrom and mastering by Tue Madsen. In that last name lies the link to what album ‘This Violent Decline’ sound like, production wise: The Haunted’s ‘Revolver’. Obviously, that was a fantastic album as well, and musically comparable to a certain extent.

What this monologue of praise leads up to is of course ‘the end’, in which I tell you yet again of all the things right about this record in a shorter way than before, and you’ll be thinking: ‘yeah sure’, or ‘wow, I have to hear this’. In both cases, you have to visit http://www.myspace.com/afterallmetal. That should actually be the affirmation of my foregone statements making the conclusion useless, but I’ll leave you with this last tip. If you’re going to buy only four albums this year, let them be Lamb Of God’s ‘Sacrament’, Mastodon’s ‘Blood Mountain’, Deftones ‘Saturday Night Wrist’ and After All’s ‘This Violent Decline’: you’ll have the millimetre perfect metal balance. Advise this to all your friends idiotic enough not to appreciate metal.
PS. What I couldn’t fit in anywhere in the text, the band has been around for like fifteen years and this is their sixth album.