Band: Crushing Sun
Title: TAO
Label: Major Label Industries
Distribution: x
Release date: August 7th 2010
Review: CD

Crushing Sun are a Portuguese collective that started in late 2003 as Defuze. Throughout the years, the band played live in, especially, Portugal and Spain, and they did release two demos that were pretty well received at the Iberian peninsula. Two years ago the band released a split with E.A.K., which marked the start of a collaboration with Major Label Industries from Portugal, and at the end of last year, Crushing Sun started recording their official debut full length album, which is called TAO.
For fifty minutes, TAO stands for technical and progressive Death Metal with a firm rhythm section, both melodic and harsh guitar riffs and modern death grunts. The songs are pretty varying and contain several changes in tempo and structure. A few times Crushing Sun oneself do add rather original elements – listen for example to the acoustic part on Jane’s Trail. The overall sphere is mechanical, even though Crushing Sun try to reach some organic completion, and it gets translated within the production, which is dry and penetrating (ouch, imagine ‘dry’ and ‘penetrating’ in one sentence…).
Even though the focus lays on modern Death Metal, the band injects elements from old school Thrash (Metallica, Slayer, Dead Head), melodic Sludge (Iron Monkey, Empty Feeling, Loinen or fellow countrymen Spitout) and slow Deathcore (Kruger, Smear, Ektomorf, Stigma).
Simplicity in its purest complexity, that’s what TAO stands for…

75/100

Ivan Tibos.