Tortured Conscience: One Law One King | Things Happened In The Middle…
(Vision Of God Records – 2023)
Almost like the phrase used by a former Argentinean president, things were going well for Tortured Conscience with their first album released in 2006, but, evidently things happened in the middle and it took almost 17 years to get back on track, almost the same time it took for this modest media to get back online. We don’t know the specific circumstances of the delay in releasing new stuff, but we celebrate that this great band can release this new album.
Between the previous album “Every Knee Shall Bow” and this new release, there were line-up changes. Jeff Lenormand continues to front the band, handling all the strings and songwriting on every song, and now adds Duane Keith II on vocals and Rene Gerbrandy on drums. Still with the trio formula, but still enough to have a powerful sound. This new line-up proves to take things much further and they have achieved a great success with this new album.
Clearly between one album and the other, not only time passed. There was an evolution in the sound of Tortured Conscience, that lead the band to move from their primitive “Brutal Death Metal”, dry, cutting and rough of the first album to a work with much more dedication, production and daring to move to the “groove” side of Metal. Careful, it’s not that now the band is a clone of the sound of the moment. On the contrary, but you can tell that they have been listening to other things, not just Napalm Death or Cannibal Corpse. So, in “One Law One King”, we have a Death Metal album with a lot of thrash, groove, cleaner guitars, but with the classic blast beats and brutality as always. This is clear in the first track, “An Open Letter”, a vulgar display of power and a free sample of the current sound of Tortured Conscience. On the contrary, on tracks like “Who Is The Blessed Man” and “Necessary Preconditions”, the band’s more familiar sound comes to the fore. To our taste, “Borrowed Capital” and “Moloch Reborn” should be the high points of this album.
“One Law One King” has only 9 tracks and in only 30 minutes, which is almost an EP. In such a short time, they are able to entertain us and torture our ears with a great album and songs that never lower their intensity, leaving us wanting more. Really, they couldn’t fit more songs on the album?
Is it too much to say that in the Tortured Conscience genre they must be one of the best bands today? Maybe I exaggerate a little, but the album really hits hard. This band doesn’t mess around and redoubles the bet towards a much more elaborated sound, more overloaded, dense and dark. The predominant characteristic is that Tortured Conscience never lowers the intensity, never letting you rest for a single minute. The lyrical part, in general lines, starts from a criticism to the current society from a quite concrete Christian perspective. A direct message without much preamble.
The sound production is one of the aspects that stands out the most when listening to “One Law One King”, since the improvement in this aspect adds a lot to the album. The recording was done in different studios, both in California and Michigan, and the mixing and mastering work is very good. The sound is fresh with a great job with the guitars and vocals.
The cover artwork is stunning, and on the graphic side of the album, the production is also very good in all aspects, having an internal collection of images as stunning as the album cover. The inner envelope, as usual, has the lyrics and all the technical data.
Everybody knows that the Death Metal genre is something that has been burnt out several times, both by the repetition of formulas and by the flood of thousands of bands of the genre. In the case of Tortured Conscience, and although we could define them as one more of that bunch, with this new work they score some points in their favor. We can notice a renewal in their more primitive sound from the first album, and that in itself is something to highlight. We hope the band continues on this path and, of course, that we don’t have to wait so many years for a new album.
To get this great album, we recommend you to try https://www.visionofgodrecords.com
