J-Man If old school technical death metal from the likes of Death, Atheist, and Pestilence is your preferred poison when it comes to extreme metal, Festival of Mutilation may be a band worth keeping your eye on. Personal Cosmos shows the band playing a style of tech-death that could have come straight from the nineties', and their convincing abilities as musicians make this EP worthwhile for fans of the genre. Though this is a rather short package that hardly adds anything to technical death metal that hasn't been done a million times before, Personal Cosmos is still a solid EP from this promising act.

Hailing from Bosnia and Herzegovina of all places, Festival of Mutilation are indeed one of the only metal bands from their country I can think of - the only other one off the top of my head is After Oblivion, who is actually pretty closely related to Festival of Mutilation. In addition to sharing two band members, both of these bands sport rather similar sounds that rely heavily on the foundation set by late-period Death. In addition to the technical and semi-melodic fretwork that characterized Death's music, Goran Džidić's vocal delivery even sounds a hell of a lot like Chuck Schuldiner's on albums like Human and Individual Thought Patterns.

Personal Cosmos doesn't cover any new ground, but the level of technical precision exhibited on this EP, as well as the strong compositions, is enough to make this a mildly interesting purchase for fans of Death. The iffy production and derivative musical approach keep this from being worthy of my highest recommendations, but you could certainly do a lot worse than this EP. 3 stars are well-deserved here, and I sense a bright future for Festival of Mutilation if they can develop a more realized sense of originality.