Boring, boring -- this kind of music bores me. The guys tried to scare us, but nothing came of it. Standard Norwegian symphonic black metal in the vein of LIMBONIC ART. They offered us nothing interesting or new: apart from a noisy pileup of multi-layered orchestral and keyboard arrangements buzzing through your speakers, with the vocalist pushed somewhere into the background, crushed by all this symphonic excess, I could not make anything out in this cacophony.
Just yesterday I wrote a review of the latest DRACONIAN album: yes, nothing new and it has all been done before, but how interesting and pleasant it is to listen to their music, knowing that the musicians approached the task with soul and professionalism. This "DIABOLICAL BREED," on the other hand, did nothing to make the average metalhead want to listen to their disc a second time.
I found nothing interesting or catchy, with the exception of a few moments featuring tempo changes and keyboard entries layered over denser and more defined riffs.
Perhaps "Compendium Infernus" can be recommended, as is customary in such cases, only to stubborn genre collectors -- they will figure out the trick behind this disc (if there even is one) -- and to anyone who wants to know where our world is heading.
So we give the black Norwegians a 6 for effort. I think they will not even be upset -- they will just append another 66 and be perfectly content.