Band : The Destiny Program
Album title : Gathas
Label : Bastardized Recordings
Distributor : Bertus
Release date : 23/04/2010
Release : CD

My introduction to this German Metalcore band came with the release of their first album under that bandname (the self-titled 2000 demo; the 2001 The Killing Fields split-CD with Narziss, Should Have Known & Self Conquest; the 2002 debut full-length album Diving Into Eternity on Beniihana Records – re-issued a year later with 2 bonus tracks; 2004’s sophomore album The Tracy Chapter on Lifeforce Records; and 2005’s In Devotion No Memories – in essence the compilation of the first two full-lengths on Japanese label Alcatrize Records…all came under the band’s original name Destiny, which they had to change due to the Swedish band of that name), and my review of “The Subversive Blueprint” (posted 23/09/2007)is still available for some fact-finding needs (something I may have forgotten to mention there, is the fact that the band took the occasion of changing their bandname to also alter their musical direction from a more straigh-forward Hardcore, to incorporate Metal elements)!

In May of 2008 TDP were on tour in the UK, playing support to Born From Pain, and in June that same year they were also on the bill of Germany’s open air summer festival With Full Force. But that wasn’t all, because eventually the band would tour throughout Europe, Brazil, Hong Kong, and Japan…partly because they were enabled to jump onto such international tours as Spirit-X-Mas Tour and Persistence Tour. Continued problems with their drummer(s) eventually forced the founding trio to enlist former Deadsoil’s Christian Bass in April 2009. During June and Juli the new line-up then spent time in Denmark’s Antfarm Studio to record Gathas again with Tue Madsen behind the knobs (he’d already been responsible for The Tracy Chapter, and had also mixed the previous album, remember?).

On the label’s website, the new album is described as follows: “…Now they’re back with their newest work Gathas, which is simply a blast for every friend of Melodic Metalcore. Emotional songs, that catch the listener with passsionate and desperate vocals. Heavy mid-tempo passages, mind blowing guitar work and bass and drum walls, that will make the heart of friends of the band and fans of bands liike Deftones and Poison The Well beat faster…”…and that ain’t even such a bad description! Vocals come two-fold (also brought by two singers), the more general type being a despairing scream, the more occasional one (short bits in album opening shortie “Spenta Mainyu”, the closing passage of “Plagiarism Commission”, the mid-section and closing passage of “Yasna”… and bigger passages in the songs “Road To A Recent Passage”, “Convention And Predictability” – even the second singer goes clean in this one, though he hàs a short screamed passage as well) of the clean Emo type. The music’s pace gives many of the songs an Ambient-like touch which is simply delectable. Oh, by the way, there’s no less than 15 songs on the album, making for a total listening plesure time of 57 minutes! For your pleasure, the band has posted two songs off their new album (alongside 2 off Subversive Blueprint and 3 off The Tracy Chapter) at their MySpace page (go to destinyonair.com, from which you can also be directed to their pages at Last.fm, YouTube, Twitter, and the Bastardized Shop). For the vinyl freaks among us, the LP should come next Fall!

92/100

Tony.