Impact

It's hard to believe that oddly monikered German thrashmongers Dew-Scented are six albums into their career with Impact, another solid, if ultimately derivative, album jammed with crunchy riff salads and hectic tempos. The group is clearly cut from the same neo-thrash cloth as the Haunted and Dimension Zero -- in other words, worshipping the ground Slayer walks on, adding in a smidgen of melody from the New Wave of Swedish Death Metal movement, and executing such maneuvers in a fairly convincing manner. However nifty some of the guitar work on Impact is, nondescript vocal howls and the group's over-reliance on back-cracking tempo changes tend to make individual songs -- and parts of songs -- virtually interchangeable. Not to say that Impact isn't a respectable effort -- but Dew-Scented, disappointingly, doesn't exhibit any ambition here beyond flexing their muscles within clearly defined genre boundaries.