There’s always a lot of talk to qualify this’n’that new album being "melodic death." At first, it seems pretty cool... on paper, that is. Problem is that it turned out that this tag generally referred to a woefully limited type of band, mostly At the Gates clones, with your Arch Enemies and Dark Tranquillities filling up the rest... Sweden cornered the market!

Oh, and also, as good as any of those bands’ finest albums are, the music is more power/heavy/goth metal with death vocals. Great? Sure. Proper death metal? No.

In swings Arsis to dispel the boredom. Undoubtedly death metal first, the totally original formula that this two-man outfit masterfully puts together incorporates the best of Swedish melodic death, French Canadian technical death, metalcore, thrash, and US death, and puts a technical spin on the whole product that sets it perhaps even above of the giants in all those genres. As far as historical references go, think of the way Cynic’s Focus or Death’s Human set the extreme metal world on its ear. Here’s the latest chapter.

A Celebration of Guilt is one of those blessed albums that wows you at first, but you know that for interminable spins of the disk thereafter, you’ll be latching on to stuff you hadn’t noticed before. Arsis is seriously in the same field of brilliance as Martyr (Canada). At the same time massively heavy, blazingly fast, tantalizingly weaving contemporary melodic death elements with a fine use of classical scales and melody, all delivered with a production that is unbelievably clear and organic sounding, this is THE album to get this year for all manner of progression-craving connoisseurs of classy, extreme technical music. E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A-L. (9.6/10)