Arsis - As Regret Becomes Guilt

Arsis presents many old demos on this As Regret Becomes Guilt. Thank goodness for these Virginians, they are breathing some much needed life back into the softening up of the melodic death metal genre. It seems as though not many bands will stand aside Dark Tranquillity in holding up the torch of melodic death metal, but Arsis seems more than happy to step up where others have fallen. I only got into these guys last year after hearing the epic "Diamond For Disease," one of the greatest melodic death metal songs released in quite awhile.

Even though this is an album of demos, it doesn't suffer from the "Oh my God what is happening to my ears" quality of many demo (or black metal) albums, and if many of the riffs and song elements from the demos weren't recognizable from the studio albums, this could pass as a studio album. It seems like many of these tracks ended up on their debut release, but there's enough to differentiate them from the studio versions that hearing the demo format isn't boring.

There's also some video content on here that makes up for the somewhat short amount of audio.

7/10 Interesting package of demos from the exciting Arsis