Facedown’s premier grind/metal act, IMPENDING DOOM, are back with a clobbering on The Serpent Servant, a triggered bastion of double-bass, downtuned everything, bass-bombs, and excreted death metal vocals. While not as inventive when compared to most bands on the Relapse or Nuclear Blast roster, the Christian-themed IMPENDING DOOM hold their own from a technical standpoint and let the MESHUGGAH influences fly (especially on the third and forth tracks “Anything Goes” and “Storming The Gates of Hell”). The Serpent Servant doesn’t have the underpinnings of a concept album, but many of the songs seem linked together by connecting riffage, and because of that, the 33 minute running time goes by in a flash.

A troublesome songwriting element that continues to haunt IMPENDING DOOM is that the band simply fails to sufficiently exploint the benefit of having two guitarists. We need more leads! Far too often the most dominant instrument is the cloppita-cloppita drumming of Chad Blackwell, with as impressive as it is, shouldn’t be the band’s defining article. “Welcome to Forever” gets things right with the guitars taking charge from the start, and only yielding to the drums when the cymbal-crashing fun begins around the three minute mark. IMPENDING DOOM should take some cues from labelmates WAR OF AGES and loosen up some of the stiffness in their sound – or at the very least, show enough emotion to make this kind of studio exercise more than the product of fancy digital editing.

Facedown Records