Engel - Absolute Design

I had been waiting quite a while for this music to finally be released. Niclas Engelin had a short stint in In Flames before starting his own melodic death metal band, Gardenian, which although now defunct, had 3 very good releases. There was a brief period where it looked like Gardenian might reform, and even had some promising demos released, but that music eventually became the first demos for Engel. Whatever the name he chose to call this project, it had some promise.

However, after a long, long wait with this project in production, it became quite clear that Engel was going to try and do a radio-friendly melodeath band similar to the Passenger side project Engelin and Anders Friden released in 2003. Now not to say that it's a bad album, I actually liked the Passenger thing they did, but I guess I should give up hopes that he will return to a Gardenian sound.

Absolute Design is about what you would expect from a radio-friendly melodic swedish band. Engelin can write some catchy guitar riifs, although much simpler than anything he's done in previous bands. They got a singer that could easily be in an american nu-metal band. He has a good singing voice which gets some good use in many of the choruses, but his nu-metal voice needs to go.

4/10 Has some high points, but overall a disappointment

(I'm going to start giving x/10 ratings)