Apoch’s - Pursuit of Honor CD Review

Battlecross is a relatively new band that molds both Power Metal and Thrash Metal together, and given the response to their independent debut album Push Pull Destroy, they clearly did a fantastic job of it. The Warren, Michigan group formed back in 2003, and until that album in 2010, the group had yet to release anything outside a demo recording in 2005. With all that time to grow as a group, and given the fact that their debut full-length received a lot of positive press, having a follow-up recording roughly one year make sense, but at the same time it leads one to wonder what the quality of the material will be like, especially if you assume the band continued to write new material for seven years, and how much of this album were the songs they chose not to include on Push Pull Destroy. Either way, Pursuit of Honor makes for the group’s second full-length, and first on an actual label, having signed to Metal Blade Records.

Right off the bat, the production quality of the recording is about what you would expect for a metal band at this point. The quality comes off a little clear and digital, but it has a muddier, chunky sound to it that works well with the band’s aggression, but at the same time doesn’t really offer much to the final product. The album has a heavy bass presence against heavy sounding guitars that have an edge to them, but feel a little blunt due to the muddier quality. This doesn’t hurt the album, though it doesn’t help it much either. The drums sound great, are all leveled properly, and the kit takes advantage of the stereo sound of the recording with the cymbols, having distinct parts of the kit go through the left speaker, and other parts on the right, though the snares and bass kicks, which have a nice medium between a strong click and loud thud, are picked up through both. Vocally, the album meshes things together with a tactic that comes off a little more along the lines of screaming with a little rhasp, to a cleaner shouting approach.

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