✦✦✧✧ It’s a bold choice to start your album with a pair of clean, not-well-tuned guitars. And yet, it’s just one of many examples on this album where these progenitors of the NY death metal scene expertly feed and feed off of your expectations. Even less modern-sounding than earlier albums, Acts Of God nevertheless deliver a potent, ineffable air of melancholic aggression, at times bordering on o.g.

✦✦✦✧ There is something both unabashedly old fashioned and cleverly fresh about this latest slab of death metal from Immolation. The sound here is nasty in that early-90s Deicide way, but also atmospheric in a way that leans almost progressive.