Objective: Okay, the facts. Ancient Existence hail from Hannover, Germany and this is their third album. They were founded in 2000 and recorded their first album “Ancient Existence” in 2002 after winning a band contest. Their second album “Night Eternal” was recorded in 2003. Which brings us to the present and their third album “Hate Is The Law”. They play midpaced Death Metal with deep croaking vocals (kind of reminded me of the vocalist from Demilich or Disgorge (Mex) except you can make out the words… sounded pretty unique to me although there’s probably someone else out there who sounds similar who I’m not familiar with). This album has a very clear, almost clinical production where every instrument is equally represented (even the bass!). I am hesitant to classify this further than Death Metal as there is a lot of variety amongst the songs. Nothing even approaching tech Death and if I remember correctly there is only one small passage of one song that contains a slow blastbeat. Subjective: Well… upon first listen I wasn’t overly impressed. The album chugs along at a medium pace without anything flashy and I wasn’t especially fond of the vocalist. I have found from experience though that you shouldn’t judge an album after just one listen so I knew I had to give it at least one more shot. I cracked open a cold one and put it on the stereo (as opposed to my Zen Vision w/AKGs) and let her rip. Well I definitely enjoyed the album more the second time around. As I said before I was hesitant to classify these guys beyond Death Metal (who fucking cares about all these stupid little genres anyway, it all gets too confusing) because every song had its own distinct personality. To me this is the strongest point of the album. It actually has some real variety. It’s not like when you pop in Marduk or Deeds of Flesh or countless others. There’s nothing wrong with the aforementioned bands (Deeds is one of my personal favorites) but you don’t pop in one of their CDs if you want to hear variety. One song has a neat little break down while another starts off standing firmly in Death Metal territory but then switches over to a crawling blastbeat with some tremolo picking that reminded me of Enslaved of all things while another song had old school Cannibal Corpse written all over it. Another thing that stood out to me was the groove. This is definitely some head noddin’ (as opposed to all out fuckin helicopter spins) music. Everyone can obviously play their instruments, but there is no gratuitous wankery to be found. Like I said above the production is very clear and you can hear everything, which is good, but sometimes I actually thought this CD would have benefited from a rawer production. Some of these songs just really would have come together with a nice dirty sound. Of course that’s just my opinion. I like that old school production, it has more personality. The only thing that I still wasn’t sure about after subsequent listens were the vocals. They were by no means bad… just not my thing. All in all I would say that this is a very solid album. This is still a relatively new band and if they can build around their strong songwriting and maybe dirty up the production (I know it sounds stupid to say this) I think these guys have the potential to release a monster in the future. When the album becomes available you can get it here: www.twilight-distribution.com and for more info go here: www.ancientexistence.de