adg211288 Total Chaos is the debut album from Canadian Death Metal act Unbreakable Hatred. The album was released in 2011 and consists of eight tracks of technically flavoured death metal, though I wouldn’t call it a fully tech death album.

Like many Death Metal albums Total Chaos isn’t that long, not even hitting the forty minute mark. Again like many other Death Metal albums this is just fine for Total Chaos in order for the album to work to its best effect. It’s short, to the point and is around the right sort of length for it to be an enjoyable listen without getting stale. The band clearly know what they want to do and do just that with little variety within the eight songs, but what they do they do pretty well, although I do have to be fair here, I don’t see a lot to separate the band between the hordes of other young Death Metal acts out there. This said based on this first offering they’re clearly a cut above many other acts I’ve come across in my time, and I’ll certainly be paying attention to them when they do a second album.

For me, and please bear in mind that this may be constituted as a personal preference, the growl of frontman Simon B. Lapointe is the weakest element of Unbreakable Hatred’s sound, but his vocals serve their purpose and do fit the album well enough and are by no means bad, but a deeper growl may have served these songs better. There are also a couple of moments within the album where Lapointe’s vocals sound somewhat strained. But other than this little quibble the three musicians in Unbreakable Hatred prove that they are clearly very competent at their instruments and as a whole Total Chaos is a solid debut offering that hints that Unbreakable Hatred is a name to watch for Death Metal fans.

The production of the album serves well enough, but I do think it could use some tweaking in order to really showcase the band’s songs at their best. The album overall just doesn’t feel as intense as I’d like.

In conclusion though I find this to be a solid and promising debut album from Unbreakable Hatred. There is much that will need to be improved within the sound in order to produce something truly exceptional, both on the writing and production fronts, but overall this album gets the thumbs up from me.

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven, scoring 8.0/10)