Six Feet Under - Commandment (2007) Death Metal Album Review

 The follow-up to 2005's 13, 2007's Commandment is decent, but falls flat. It has great riffs and a sick guitar tone, but on this album Chris Barnes' vocals really start to deteriorate. 

It opens with "Doomsday", which has great crushing guitar riffs and their guitars sound very good, but once the vocals start you can tell Barnes' is struggling. It's still a cool song due to the guitar work, but it is held back in the vocal department. However, the vocals aren't that bad! I've heard much worse and honestly once you get used to them the music is pretty enjoyable, just not up to the standard set by much better previous albums like Haunted, 13, and Maximum Violence.

By www.sfu420.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22790397

This is one of those albums where the songs all sound the same, they just blend together and I can't tell one apart from the other despite the fact that I listen to a lot of death metal and am a big fan of Six Feet Under themselves. There's often no pause between tracks, like the album is all one big long song.

In fact, the very first time I listened to this album, I didn't even realize that the second track, "Thou Shalt Kill", had started until I looked at my cd player and saw the "two" on the screen. The same can be said about the rest of the album. This isn't to say that it's necessarily bad per se, it's pretty cool actually, especially if you like this genre of music. It's just that this outing is kind of generic compared to the previous album 13. On that album, the songs were all differentiated and you could easily tell them apart, though they were all basic death metal and nothing experimental.

That being said I'd still say check this album out, but only if you're really into Six Feet Under. If you are new to the band I'd recommend Haunted, 13, or Maximum Violence first.