Belgian death metal formation Fractured Insanity has delivered some critically acclaimed releases in their 12 years of existence. They bring a highly technical and brutal form of death metal that blitzkriegs right over you. 6 years after their last release they’ve created their 3rd record Man Made Hell.

Like their label advertises, they sound very much like other bands in the genre like the early Decapitated, Kronos, Severe Torture and of course the masters of brutal tech death: Nile. Everything about them screams death metal: the deep guttural vocals, heavily distorted and low tuned guitars and double bass blast beats. Talking about those drums, drummer Ignace is a beast, he now and then even made me wonder if they didn’t use a drum machine. Luckily it’s not all just “blasting away”, they manage to keep the listeners attention by switching tempos regularly within every song and treating us to highly technical pieces. Whenever they actually slow down they seem to compensate this by being heavy as fuck. Besides all this, they didn’t forget to put in enough melody for the songs to stay memorable.

An early highlight for me is The Blame of Humanity, in which they use some catchy, groovy pieces that remind me of some of Six Feet Under‘s work. To then later in the song put in a face melting, blistering guitar piece that almost seems to keep up tempo with the blast beats. This song really pulled me more into the record than anything else at first. The next song that will definitely peak people’s interest is Inferno of a Narcissist. The intro consists of at first a piano piece that really surprised me and is a nice very short break in all the onslaught that is going on on this record. After which they break in some guitar riffs that somehow reminds me very much of the sound of Satyricon on the record The Age of Nero, slowly building up to yet another great death metal piece. The last song I want to mention is Suicidal Holiness. Here they kick off with some very atmospheric doomy Gregorian chanting, slowly building up again to a song dedicated to their aversion for religion. I’m saying “religion” here, ’cause I have the impression that they’re not focusing on Christianity. The combination of the chanting and deep voiced spoken word pieces “No religion is worth killing for”, makes this song remind me even more of Nile than the rest of the record. In my humble opinion definitely the best song of the record, they dragged me in and never let me go with this one.

As mentioned earlier, fans of brutal technical death metal like Decapitated, Severe Torture, Kronos and definitely Nile will find this a record they’ll want in their collection. But there’s enough variation and interesting things going on in the music that even people who aren’t the biggest fan of this form of extreme metal -like me- will very much appreciate this creation. I’m giving this an 8/10.

Release date: April 15th, 2016
Label: Xtreem Music
Tracklist:
1. Habitual Killer
2. The Blame of Humanity
3. Forced to Rome
4. Inferno of a Narcissist
5. Man Made Hell
6. One Shot Salvation
7. A Blasted Life
8. Suicidal Holiness