Coming out of the cold depths of Melbourne’s metal scene, Toxicon have in a short amount of time built a good name for themselves as a band that know how to write a good riff. Their debut album “Purge” is chock full of them and here have produced a brilliant album that is headbanger worthy.
On first impression 1 or 2 songs intro the album, it seems Toxicon are your standard guitar driven Pantera inspired groove metal band and while you wont find anything mind blowingly new here, what you will find is a band who have taken their influences by the reigns and ran full pelt with a barrage of heavy riffs, blistering solos and melodic sounds that all blend perfectly together to create some damn fine heavy metal.
There are thrashy moments here too like in “Crawler” with it’s Death Angel inspired style while other tracks like “Immersifier” (complete with socio-political messages and some distinctive words from Carl Sagan!) and “Death Proof” contain prog elements contained within a groove based metal sound. Even some classic metal like “Deadly Sin” can be found here as the band push the boundaries of where they can take the music. “Wall Of Mirrors” has to be the highlight of the album though, it bounces along through groove based combinations of hardcore and thrash with a banging breakdown midway that just breaks your neck. Just thinking about seeing this at a live show makes you salivate at the mouth and wanting to tear the room apart.
There’s a lot of variety on ‘Purge’ within the realms of it’s groove metal style and a hell of a lot of melody, both on guitars and on vocals where the latter has a nice blend of the cleans and growls but not in a way that makes you want to puke in your soup like so many commercial based melodic core metal these days. Toxicon have a hell of a debut album here and it’s one to make you look forward to hearing many more from this band.
TRACKLIST
Heroes Of The Deluge
Deadly Sin
Wall Of Mirrors
Crawler
Immersifier
Deathproof
Face Of The Earth
Into The Filth
Nowhere To Go
Void
Event Horizon
