I'll attack the vocals first: The general scream/growl gets almsot boring, there is no variety in vocals like there was in TD. Its all the same pitch, nearly. And the clean vocals are pretty bad, he's singing the Extol style, but it's not nearly as good. I think the singing ruins more songs than it makes. Not that the style of them sucks, i think its great that they are doing something different, but the vibrato gets annoying, and they just don't fit usually.
Secondly, the lead guitar: I am still not impressed with originality on lead. Sure, its insane fast, but its the same thing over and over again throughout the CD. That same gradual, wannabe dramatic, lightning fast solos, with a terrible tone. you can barely tell the difference between the solos, and half of the time the temp is slowed down to 0 when the solos come!
Honestly, the songs aren't that different from each other, its not repetative, but, its just "safe" from beginning to end.
The rythm guitar is definetly top notch, awesome stuff.
Lyrics are awesome.
With that being said, it doesn't live up to TD in several ways, but its still an album far out of the league of nearly every other death metal band i've heard. Its obviously incredible stuff with a lot of talent, and this is one of the greatest metal bands i've heard. Maybe I'm just not happy with the arrival of Alex, I liked the old guitarist's style a lot more.
I'm not against change, I think progressing is a huge part of being a band, but this progression went the wrong way for me.
It's quite polished.
Terminate Damnation was so versatile, there is a 4 part song ballad, there is a classical instrumental, they have a freaken blues solo in the middle of an extremely agressive death metal song! The Physics Of Fire just doesn't live up to TD in my opinion, though a lot of people think this is a lot better.
3/5. If you like BTA, get it, if you are going to get your first BTA album, get TD.
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