The Kandidate – Facing the Imminent Prospect of Death (2012)

Opening 2012 for Napalm Records today we have The Kandidate’s sophomore release “Facing the Imminent Prospect of Death”. The band plays and inferior version of label mates Hatesphere’s Groove infused Thrash Metal. While not entirely bad, “Facing the Imminent Prospect of Death” is an album devoid of any originality and it is as vanilla as you can get.

Featuring the original Hatesphere singer Jacob Bredahl, this release indeed sound a bit like older Hatesphere without the constant improvement they offered through the years. The crunchy opening track “Death” delivers pretty solid riffing and a very catchy nature, but it kind of feels a bit cold for an opening track. The music gets a bit better in the next track, but it never really picks up. We have some nice powerful riffs that circle around the songs a bit too much and never really hooked us into liking the tracks.

Opting for tracks that drift between 2:30 and 3:40 minutes, the band sounds has a severe lack of creativity. The guitars get dull after four songs and the vocals are very monotonic. There is something about the distortion used that sounds a bit off with the rest of the instruments making them sound a bit outdated and dirty.

If we had to pick a track we ‘liked’, we would say that “Total War” is the most engaging and entertaining one. The riffing is good, the drumming is excellent and the pummeling bass guitar gets the job done. Other than this track, we would rather save our money before buying this CD and pick it up from the bargain bin in a few months instead.

Release: February 7th, 2012

Country: Denmark