Jungle
Slang: Glory Outshines Doom

Glory Outshines Doom

(Slang)
Label(s): 
Genre: 
Release Date: 
Monday, October 27, 2014
Grade:
A
Tracks: 
15

I know this saying is cliché and yet in this instance it is so very, very true, but I thought I had heard it all until I listened to the band called Sl(a)ng or just Slang. When I first looked at the cover to this album I thought, oh great here's a band that's using Japanese writing for their songs as a way to make themselves look different. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong with my initial thoughts about this band because the Japanese writing, it's real and it's real because Slang is a South Cost Japanese hardcore death metal band. They are a band that really knows how to make a song rock with some hardcore beats and rhythms. These guys rock so much that it does not matter that it's all in Japanese and in fact the way they do sing is actually better than a lot of American hardcore metal/deathcore bands. The lyrics might be in Japanese and I don't understand them, but I would bet that all the screaming couldn't have been easy to do where the songs are still clear and precise like they are.
Again, my first impression of Glory Outshines Doom was that this was just another American band that would be singing some hardcore metal songs. I went into it expecting not to understand what was being sung in the vocals, which I don't, but that's for a different reason. This is a Japanese band so don't expect to be listening to songs that are in English, they're not. Every song is sung in Japanese, which is fitting for the band and I actually like them a bit more for not having them translated because though I might not understand them, the outcome might not have been as intense as it is with the vocals being in Japanese. So what are the songs about? I have no clue what-so-ever. For all I know they could be sing about dancing around in a field of sunflowers with rainbows in the sky and butterflies of lovely colors filling the air. I highly doubt that, but hey it's possible.
Which actually, if that was the actual meaning of the songs or they were singing about that, I would like this band on a whole new level. Why? Because even though I don't understand what they are saying in the songs, the raw sound being pumped out is so intense that whatever they are saying can't be nice. Which only makes if they were nice all the better. Still, if you want some powerful, loud, intense, songs so full of energy that it feels like not only are you going to explode but your speakers will as well. Everything about this album is just power, the guitars that are fast, they are squelching out riffs like a machine is playing them on extreme high speed, the vocals are guttural, they're raw and intense, and the drums are being pounded on like there's no tomorrow coming. There's only a few calm moments in these songs, that's when one track ends and there's that silence of the changing tracks, but for 38 minutes you will be bouncing off walls and wishing you spoke Japanese.

Lee Roberts
Review by Lee Roberts
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