Egemony - Baptism of the Unborn (Nice to Eat You Records; 2009)

Egemony is a relatively new one-man band and because of this fact comparisons to bands like Insidious Decrepancy, Putrid Pile, or perhaps Infinite Defilement come to mind. However a much better comparison would be to countrymen Septycal Gorge.

That's not to say Egemony is as good as Septycal Gorge (few bands are), but the riffing style and song structures definitely recall Septycal Gorge. Both bands rely on a lot of very interesting and memorable tremolo riffs complemented with weird sounding but still heavy slams. The best moments on this album are when a cool sounding tremolo riffs going into a quick, pounding slam section and then right back into the tremolo riffs. If the riffs and song writing didn't give away Egemony's Septycal Gorge influence, the fact that a cover version of the song "Abominated Hierarchy" is included as a bonus track should.

Egemony is not purely a clone band though. Whereas Septycal Gorge often feels very big and open, Egemony felt very dense to me. This made each individual song less memorable. I can also hear influence from other Italian bands like Putridity and Clitoridus Invaginatus in the pinch harmonics and slams, and Deeds of Flesh in the tremolo riffs.

Although these influences are strongly felt, there's just enough of a mixture to keep Egemony from sounding totally derivative. Baptism of the Unborn is a decent album that fans of Italian brutal death metal should especially like.