Malefice - “Awaken the Tides” Review

England’s Malefice are back with their catchy brand of death metal with the release of their second album through Metal Blade Records “Awaken the Tides”. Although there seems to be some argument over how exactly to categorize Malefice; I’ve seen them described as ‘death metal’, ‘heavy metal’, ‘deathcore’ and ‘thrash metal. For this website’s sake we’ll just make it simple and call ‘em ‘melodic death metal‘. Anyway, these guys are great. I know that sounds fairly succinct, but it’s true! This was my first opportunity to sample Malefice and I will definitely list them as one of my favorite metal bands of 2011.
Malefice blends different subgenres of metal and they do it damned well; which is why I’m assuming it’s so hard to classify them. Although they can be a little too poppy for me at times (as in tracks “Minutes” and “The Day the Sky Fell”), the rest of the album fucking rocks. If you don’t like the title track “Awaken the Tides” from the new Malefice album, then you won’t like the rest of it.