Band:	Iconocaust
Album:	Judas Complex
Style:	Death metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	2010

01. The Inevitable Onslaught
02. Beaten Bloodied Broken
03. Judas Complex
04. Eve of Deceit
05. Lies of the Betrayer
06. Nazi's Torch
07. Road To Ruin
08. Final Doom
09. Pro A Pera Argentum

Depending on what track you throw on first, you'll either immediately love this album, or immediately laugh at it. Take the title track; it kicks off with a riff that sounds like it was ripped straight from Ashes Of The Wake, moseys into a pretty lame, mid-paced opening verse, then proceeds to stumble around with some pop metalcore-esque clean vocals. It's not a good song. But it doesn't come close to capturing the sonic goodness of some of the other tracks on this. Judas Complex fluctuates pretty manically from being interesting, to being anodyne, brutal and crazy sounding, to being just plain mushy.

It goes from sounding almost strictly Lamb Of God-inspired, to sounding more Psycroptic-esque, to sounding pretty whiny. Then there will be moments that have a Benighted-brand touch of insanity. The album goes all over the place, both into boring, overdone, heard-it-before regions and into more straight-forward fun ones. And it's the variation on this that makes it an entertaining listen. It isn't just a modern-metal clone, nor is it purely for the people who just want to put their head through walls. Rather than just being your average death metal album, Judas Complex incorporates both proggish meandering and some more straight-forward slamming that makes it pretty fucking cool.

If you can get past the occasionally lame cleans, a suspiciously familiar riff or two, and the preachy sound-bites thrown in here and there, there's a really solid death metal album somewhere in this.