Kev Rowland This Italian band may have no original members left, but guitarist Giulio Moschini has been there since before their second album, 2005’s ‘Pageantry For Martyrs’, and everyone on this their eighth album all played on 2017’s ‘Cast The First Stone’ as well. Apparently misotheism means either "hatred of God" or "hatred of the gods", so they’re not very happy with whatever deity you believe in, and that’s absolutely fine. They started off as a blackened death band all those years ago, but like many have changed their approach as they have worked through the ages, but whereas they were generally seen as a brutal death metal act, to me they have moved far more into the technical death metal area. This is an album that any fan of Nile (me! me!) will be taking a very serious listen to indeed. It has to be played loud, really loud, to get the full benefit of a rhythm section who are mixing and moving in multiple ways and refusing to always concentrate on blast beats and brain numbing attacks but can swing t around and even stop playing altogether if that is the right thing to do. Then at the front you have Moschini and his partner in crime Paolo Pieri (who also provides the vocals). These two have been twisting their complex riffs and lines together for nearly ten years now, and it shows. This is complex and complicated uncompromising death metal played by four guys who really have the chops.

This is music full of aggression, full of rage and hatred, from a band who are living it, not just playing at it. They mix and move, but if they had done it a little bit more then they may have ended up with an even better album than the one they did, but even as it stands this a great testament to a band who have now been around for more than 20 years and show no signs at all of slowing down and may only just be getting into their groove. Well worthy of investigation by those who enjoy the genre.

Nightfly Disturbance is the debut album from Italian brutal death metal band Hour Of Penance. Even at this early stage the band are clearly great musicians. They are as brutal as the best of them and play with the usual lightning speed with great precision that’s associated with this sub-genre. Where it falls a little flat is in the songwriting department. Each song passes by in a blur of notes and blastbeats but the riffs lack that killer edge to set them apart from the pack. The guttural growls are no better or worse than I’ve heard numerous times before.

Opener, excluding the short atmospheric instrumental, Rise And Oppress gets thing off to an impressive start and is probably the pick of the bunch with some compelling shifting rhythms and dissonant riffing. After this things rarely let up but most of the riffs are less memorable and a bit more variety wouldn’t go amiss. They make some amends on final track Blood Tribute. At over 8 minutes long it gives them the opportunity to get more inventive and even slows down a bit and adds some dynamics.

Fans of the likes of Hate Eternal should find Hour Of Penance to their liking but If you’ve never heard them before I’d dive straight in at 2010’s Paradogma. By then they’d matched the impressive chops with much better songs.

Warthur Business as usual brutal death metal from this Italian unit. Laudably, it doesn't outlast its welcome, barely scratching over the half hour mark, though I find myself unsatisfied at the end of that half hour. Yes, they're very loud and very aggressive and very brutal, but also very... forgettable. More or less everything they play sounds good at the time I hear it, but it doesn't stick with me and doesn't resonate to the extent that it really needs to in order come across as anything other than a competent retread of the conventions of this particular metal subgenre. Death metal superfans would love this, though.

UMUR "Sedition" is the 5th full-length studio album by Italian death metal act Hour of Penance. The album was released through Prosthetic Records in March 2012.

The music on "Sedition" is brutal and technically well played death metal. While the band do change pace on occasion this is generally a furiously fast-paced album. We´re talking hyber blasting of the finest quality. While they somewhat fall under the catagory of technical death metal, Hour of Penance is more "old School" than most other acts that are usually tagged like that. In other words they are closer to the sound of acts like Morbid Angel and Behemoth than they are to the sound of Obscura and their ilk. Hour of Penance are not the type of band who takes prisoners, and with a total playing time of 31:24 minutes "Sedition" is the kind of album that´ll crush your skull with it´s brutal sound and devastating blast beats but at the same time intrigue you with technical details. The brutal growling and mostly unintelligible vocals could have been more varied for my taste, but they get the job done nicely.

"Sedition" features a clear and powerful sound production and along with the excellent musicianship and the solid songwriting this is a pretty strong death metal release. A 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is warranted.

adg211288 Sedition is the fifth full-length album released by Italian brutal death metal act Hour of Penance. Since the release of their previous album Paradogma (2010) the band has parted ways with vocalist Francesco Paoli Fleshgod Apocalypse), and brought in Paolo Pieri (Shoreborn, Aborym, Kalki Avatara etc) as a replacement. Pieri also steps up as a second guitarist alongside Giulio Moschini, returning the band to a two guitar line-up as it was with their first two albums. Additionally the band had a new drummer in Simone Piras, who replaced Mauro Mercurio, but by the time of this review has already parted ways with the band himself. Sedition was released in 2012.

Sedition is one of those albums for me where after giving it a single listen I felt very much underwhelmed by the whole experience. I didn’t think the release to be bad or anything but rather one that failed to stand out. Fortunately for both me and Hour of Penance I never write an album off after one listen, and Sedition really opened up to me the second time around. This is brutal death metal with a technical death metal edge to it, carried by strong vocals and an unrelenting force behind the instrumental work.

In fact the only semi-negative thing I have to say is that for the album Hour of Penance went down the path of the brief cliché intro track that in itself doesn’t bring much to the album. It makes for a decent build up to the first proper song, Enlightened Submission, though, I will say that much for it. And from there in it’s all about the death metal.

What I like most about Hour of Penance’s sound here though has to be although at its core it is brutal death metal they don’t just focus on being brutal above all else. There are melodies which I think are very well done with the way they are integrated into the tracks as needed, and that technical edge I mentioned that spices the sound on occasion but doesn’t take it over. And once Enlightened Submission kicks off they are content to bash out songs in this vein one after the other for about half an hour’s worth of music. Not a long album by my own standards but the ideal sort of time I think for the sort of music that Hour of Penance plays since for all intents and purposes Sedition isn’t an album you’d come to for variation (and I don’t think fans of brutal death metal would want it either), and it does its work before it has time to get stale. I find the replay value in Sedition very high because of that.

A grower for sure, I have come to regard Sedition as one of the strongest death metal efforts I’ve encountered so far for 2012. More than that I’ve given the album plenty of listens building up to this review due to my track record of finding these sort of albums to lose their appeal after some time and found that any issues I’ve had with brutal death metal in the past simply do not exist in Sedition. That alone has brought me to regard the release as exceptional but even more than that, it is very well played and the production by Stefano Morabito suits the music so well that as I was writing the main text of this review I realised that despite some early misgivings if I rated the album any lower than a masterpiece tier rating it would be a crime against death metal music.

9.5/10

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven (http://metaltube.freeforums.org))