„Wake up… time to die!“ Greece is not well-known for their death-metal, so when I got it, I was pretty anxious to hear this demo (six songs plus intro, outro and two bonus songs). According to the short bio I got with this CD, Project Havok plays ‚brutal, hyperweight death/grind.‘ After putting this thing on, I must conclude that the grind-part should be ignored. Instead, I would add the word ‚industrial‘. The first song starts with a few Bolt-thrower riffs, but as I whole this is best described as ‚extremely heavy, downtuned bulldozer deathmetal‘. Havok combines fast blastparts with slow threatening passages. The guitars have a Mortician-sound over them, the drums sound cold and murderous and the vocals also have this really ‚mechanic‘ sound. When I come to think of it, this is the most original piece of metal I heard for a long while, and each time I hear this demo I grow more and more excited! At first, I was thinking of criticising the ‚lack of variation‘ but after a while I realised that this misplaced idea comes from the fact that the guitars are so distorted that after a while every song sounds like eachother while actually they are quite different. The production is okay by demo-standards although occasionally the guitarsound becomes a bit ‚blurry.‘ This is about the only negative thing I have to say about ‚Severly Damaged‘ and if I was in the band I would’ve also left out the bonus rehearsal versions of ‚Advanced Level Decay‘ and ‚Inbreeding Havok‘ (the original ‚Inbreeding Havok‘ is brilliant by the way!!). I love the way this band creates the most apocalyptic atmosphere I heard since Axis of Perdition. This is something new, and while I realize not everyone will like their insane downtuned deathstorm I can advice all ‚progressive‘ death metallers to check this shit out as soon as it becomes more widely available!! I truly hope the band continues on this path and will not be tempted into becoming the 2.788.321th Cannibal Corpse clone just to please the masses…Considering the fact that this is a demo, as well as the first release of the band I come to the following score:
9/10 Points – reviewed by Bloodreaver