Whitechapel - This Is Exile
Metal Blade Records (7/8/08)
Extreme metal
"Never underestimate immortality."
—"Eternal Refuge"
As much as you may want to shoehorn Whitechapel into the death metal genre, there's just too much going on with the band's sound to do so without regret.
On the surface, the band just tears through the 11 tracks on This Is Exile with abandon, and shoves in enough plodding riffs and double-bass drumming to fill a (sizable) graveyard. However, Phil Bozeman varies up his vocal delivery to such an extent—from growls to grunts to this really interesting stutter-chant (check out the closing moments of "Possession" and then again on "To All That Are Dead") or straight metal howls—and the band fully takes advantage of its triple-guitar attack to flesh out riffs (see "To All That Are Dead" again) and solos that, in the end, this music just has too many layers to be considered simply death metal.
