Electro metal. It oftens promises much but just doesn’t quite deliver, usually teetering too far one way or the other, trying to shoehorn sounds in where they don’t belong, or simply just trying to please everyone instead of sticking to it’s guns and blowing listeners away with the majesty of it all…

At first, I thought The Defect might be just such a band, as the NumanNIN-Nu-Metal hybrid that is opener Annihilate emerged from the speakers. It’s an archetypal industrial metal album opener, nothing more nothing less, and it didn’t really dangle much of a listening carrot in front of my battered old ears.

Still, as the bossman keeps telling me, I’m a professional, so I stayed with the album, and I have to say I’m glad I did, because it turns out Death X Destiny is rather a nice little exercise in musical mashupery. Vocalists Johnny McBee (you may know him from The Browning) and Moon have voices that mesh spectacularly well, and the band do have a knack for actually being able to blend their influences well, resulting in an album that covers a lot of ground stylistically whilst retaining a coherent creative core to it’s sound at all times.

Dreamwalker, Lost in the Shadows and (especially) closer A Way Out are all superb slices of modern metal, real top-drawer examples of ambition being augmented by classy execution; Being hyper critical, you might say that occasionally the songs are a little predictable in structure, but even at their most obvious, as on the second track Run, the band show enough chutzpah it make it impossible to actually dislike the noise coming out of the speakers.

The band sensibly also never let songs outstay their welcome – nothing here even clocks in at four minutes in duration – which gives a sense of edge and urgency to the album, and in the final analysis I’d have to say I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. Great stuff!