The current state of the heavy music scene often resembles the modern book market. There are the giant inspirers, the true masters, and then there is everyone else. As a result, tons of garbage in expensive and not-so-expensive covers sit in bookstores — but paradoxically, they don't sit for long, because people consume it all. Roughly the same tendencies exist on the metal scene. The number of bands grows exponentially; there are titans of their genres, and then there are completely colorless followers drowning in their own inability to come up with anything new. The performance is quite often competent, compositionally we sometimes encounter decent songs, but after spinning the disc a couple of times, we realize we have heard nothing that would indicate the band's individuality. What can save you in this situation? High technical skill, the ability to write hits even using borrowed ideas, impeccable recording, and a few other factors. All of this can be dismissed if there is individuality, yet the latter is an increasingly rare phenomenon.
So then, the disc is called "Failure to Perfection," the band is SUBMISSION — Danes who formed in 2003, recorded a demo in 2004, an EP in 2005, and this very disc in 2006. Let us try to save the band and prove there is something distinctive about them. Let's begin. The vocals — the most awful thing about the band. They are simply nonexistent, zero, one could put it various other ways. Moreover, there is a sense that while recording his parts, the vocalist was listening to something completely different from the music present on the disc. The mastering, quite uneven overall, did nothing to remedy the situation. The drums operate on a scheme: snare — machine gun burst — kick drums — snare — machine gun... like a dog chasing its tail, basically. The guitars — well, riffs are riffs, and there is even something resembling brief solos. The bass carries no independent function whatsoever. Stylistically, it is melodic death metal with small infusions of metalcore. Of course there are passages with clean vocals — "everyone else has them, so we need them too." In short, we listened, wished the band would relegate the current vocalist to clean parts only and find someone who can actually growl properly, ejected the disc, put it away having already forgotten its name, and moved on to something else. It would have been better if the disc were at least irritating — then there would be something to note about it. The material is passable for live shows; in its studio form, it induces boredom.