Mouth Of The Architect – The Violence Beneath (2010)

American Sludge Metal monsters are back with “The Violence Beneath”, a four song EP that features two new songs, a live song and a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”. While we feel that this EP does a good job to create anticipation for the band’s future full-length release, an anticipation that is currently burning inside us, since we really enjoy Mouth Of The Architect’s (MOTA) releases.

Two years have passed since their crushing album “Quietly” and we were wondering what was going out with MOTA. With the two new tracks “The Violence Beneath” and “Buried Hopes” we get a nice continuation from where the band left off with “Quietly”.

The first track is crushing and monumental, with supper heavy riffs and brutal screams, it creates a super thick atmosphere and we love it. With “Buried Hopes” the band starts considerably slower, but only to pick up the pace around the 3 minute mark, and we are back to crushing riffing and an interesting combination of clean vocals and screams, clocking over 10 minutes this is a very powerful track that states the band is not getting softer over the years.

From what we can dig up the live song, “Restore”, is also new since it’s not featured in any of their releases. But we can’t be 100% sure of that so we just don’t consider it as new. However this track has the same soul as any of the MOTA songs over the years, but the live aspect takes away some of the production values that we like so much about this band. The drums sound a bit weak in comparison to most of their studio stuff.

The last track, “In Your Eyes” is a cover from Peter Gabriel’s song and it shows that the band can do an excellent job at giving cover songs their own signature sound and not just play them the same way as the original. The clean vocals are a nice touch to this song, and paired with the screams they work magically to capture the essence of both MOTA and the Peter Gabriel song.

“The Violence Beneath” is a great warm-up for what we expect to be an epic future full-length release from this American band. We recommend you pick this one up, since you never know how much time we will have to wait for a new release of this band.

Release: April 17th, 2010

Country: USA