With the release of Red Descending’s debut full-length Where Dreams Come To Die, the Australian town Perth has another band they can be proud of, except for the drum ‘n bass act Pendulum. Red Descending plays melodic death metal, but they’re absolutely not your traditional melodic death metal band. Once in a while you can hear that they’ve listened to the music of In Flames and its sympathizers, but they mainly focus on the symphonic elements.

In power and black metal it is way more common to put symphonic elements in your songs, but there are few death metal bands trying to be successful with it. Red Descending is a band who does try it and they have done a great job. When we forget about the industrial influenced ‘Departure’, which is very misplaced on this record, they have created a record that combines melody and heavy music perfectly. The synthesizer is a very important factor in their music and this is worked out very well.

Besides the outstanding synthesizer, also the vocals are well-taken care of. The grunts from Bernard Shaw are good, but especially the voice of guest vocalist Rebecca Brennan is the finishing touch some tracks needed. She has a voice that can be compared to Liv Kristine’s and, although it’s not common to hear female vocals in death metal, it doesn’t sound strange or uncomfortable at all.

When thinking about the fact that this band has done everything themselves, except for the mastering, it makes the achievement bigger than it was already. When they would have left the industrial influences they would have scored even higher, but hey… this is just their debut record and you can’t blame them for not having found their own, final sound already.