“Psycho Choke”? I sigh slightly and put it on, expecting a pretentious and contrived album, full of gore metal type lyrics and disappearing up its own ass somewhere before the middle of the record. Turns out, rather pleasingly, I’m way off the mark.

The intro is an atmospheric industrial affair — all bleak and daunting, with distorted mechanical heartbeats, electronic zaps and echoed roaring that puts me in mind of the battlefield scenes in The Terminator.

Then, it’s straight into it. I was expecting more industrial, but instead, “Freedom In A Bottle Of Scotch” brings fast and technical shredding. The songs are generally structured to a formula and you can easily pick out verse, chorus, bridge etc., but these guys have found what works for them and made it work. Genre-wise, they’re pretty much standard metalcore with and in every song you can hear influences from Sepultura, Korn and Trivium woven in with melodic sections to provide some accessibility. They’ve definitely got their own sound though and the bands that have influenced them are just in there as familiar echoes rather than outright rip offs. In fact, their sound is so well blended, almost every song or section reminds you of one band or another in some way without you necessarily being able to put your finger on who. It doesn’t always work perfectly though — “Get Down” (Featuring Gus G.) for example, sounds disturbingly like Disturbed.

Technically these guys are tight, with Argy and Bax providing guitars ranging from standard palm-mute chugging to scale-defying solos with a few nicely wild twists and turns. These guys are ably backed up on bass by Phantomas, who does get a little lost in the guitar noise, but keep an ear out on tracks like “Death By Words” and the intro to “Swamp” and you’ll hear him proving a low and dark backdrop. George on drums plants his hammers with a precision that had me tapping along happily but with enough variety in the fills to make predicting beats challenging, but without being completely off-beat. Finally, Al Roy’s vocals are a standard shouting growl for the most part, which is instantly evocative of Max Cavalera and fans of Cavalera-era Sepultura and particularly Soulfly should feel strangely at home, but he also mixes it up with almost Nu-Metal-esque melodic sections that fit in with the rest of the track, but only because they are done well. Lyrically there are a few pages taken from the Big Book of Metal Clichés, with howlers like “Pull my finger now!” and “Lock it and load”, but they are part of a bigger picture and delivered with aplomb, so I’m willing to let it go.

The problem is that familiarity breeds contempt and although the familiarity of the tracks is somehow comforting and makes it easy to get into, it doesn’t stand out in any big way. It’s the sort of thing that you’d throw a couple of favorite tracks into a playlist of heavy stuff and put the whole album on occasionally, but not an album that I personally would listen to over & over. That being said, it’s a solid release and well worth a listen.

Thinking back to the Terminator intro, if no one minds, I’m going to create a new subgenre — Accessimetal. The sort of metal that invariably turns up on soundtracks to any film with even the tiniest dark edge to it, so as to infer greater darkness and appeal to those of us with a penchant for this stuff, while remaining accessible enough not to send ‘normal’ patrons screaming from the theatre. Think of the soundtracks to Spawn, Godzilla, Demon Knight etc. I feel Psycho Choke would fit pretty well into this category — heavy enough to make you nod your head, but falling just short of making you want to bang it.

3.5/5