SUBMISSION, Failure to Perfection (2010, Listenable)

The skull:
Brown and mustard. Not off to a good start. The rayed background is lame, too. The skull, which is shamefully obscured by a very boring logo, is flanked by a couple guns, and then some dog skulls or something? And then there’s a big screw. This is about as random as it gets, but it’s also a pretty good representation of the title, which itself fails to even form a syntactical sentence fragment. What we have here is a total commitment to half-assing it.

The music:
Groovy melodic death metal, kind of like recent Dark Tranquillity, with fairly awful growls and a smattering of reasonably good clean vocals. Submission aren’t doing anything new, but they work this style admirably well, with some really cool guitar riffs to keep things moving. The drums, while proficiently played, offer no surprises, and there are too many core-style breakdowns for my liking, but overall, Submission are alright. I doubt I’ll go out and buy their disc, but at least listening to it for this review wasn’t painful. Anymore, that’s about as good as it gets here at Skull HQ.
— Friar Johnsen