In which Indian riffmeisters Kryptos offer up their most consistently melodic offering yet…

It’s been great to watch the evolution of Bangalore’s finest over the eight year duration of Sentinel Daily‘s existence. Watching the band mutate in real time over the course of three albums has been a fascinating process, and, ultimately, a rewarding one, for on Decimator the band come up with some of the finest, most mature riffage they’ve yet concocted.

Thanks to the sandpaper throat of guitarist Nolan Lewis they’ve always had a Teutonic edge to their sound, but that is more likely to express itself in similarities now to The Scorpions (superb standout cut Turn Up The Heat could easily have found itself a place nestling in that band’s early eighties canon) or Accept (the similarly effective Electrify) than the old time nods to Kreator or Grave Digger.

Whether that’s a good thing is of course a matter of personal taste, but you won’t find this reviewer  complaining; This is a band that still maintains it’s metal credibility no matter how tuneful their tunes become, and they underline that here time and again with headbanging treats like opener, the NWoBHM-tinged Sirens of Steel and the ram-it-down-bravado of the title track, which acts as a perfect bridge between the band’s past to the present.

Decimator is a short album, weighing in at nine tracks and with a run time of just over half an hour, but the band don’t waste a second of that duration, and if you’re a fan of straight-up, old fashioned heavy metal it’s hard to see anything here that you could actively object to, much les find fault in. This is a band that knows it’s strengths and how to deploy them, and consequently it’ll be appearing in all manner of best in show award lists at the end of the year with this ripsnorting platter.

Decimator releases on July 5th.