Third album - 2nd with new vocalist - for the US 5-piece after 2 years of silence, bringing back a sort of Modern metal requiring melodic and touchy vocals, alternated with aggressive ones, or on one occasion whispered threatening ones, in the vein of Sevendust, Drowning Pool, P.O.D., and the likes.
Altho not all the tracks are situated at the elevated quality level of "The Passion Within", "Walk away" (so weird, dynamic and aggressive, between Anacrusis and Mudvayne, I swear!), "Another Empty Soul" (already fine in its core yet even more embellished by one of the rare guitar solos of the record), "The Coming of Death" (caterpillar Swedish Deathrash meets Slipknot along with unforeseeable solutions and noise additions render the album worth the buy), "Last Day" (containing the best chorus and hooks of all the compositions here included along with "A Quarter More"), and "Our Fathers' Embrace" (rich in time changes making it more lively and made more precious by Peter Wichers' guest guitars), 3 Quarters Dead need to be kept an eye on; not much because of the 2 guest musicians, but most of all because soon they won't need them anymore to attract attention. Soon the songwriting and the arrangements of all of their songs will be homogenous at the top and that'll be the time when a big label will have them signed and will make them popular to the whole world as they deserve, even more than the two videos they've released so far (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkKytQsl1gc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWKVwblq5RM) have been able to do.
And sure, it's true that they took some elements and structures already used by some bands in the past, still they've added something of their own, producing an original enough batch of songs; such is the case of the Metalcore passage in "No More Love". It's nothing new and that oughtn't to be seen in a negative light; for instance Brahms did the same with Beethoven.
Last but not least, the powerful, polished and ultraprofessional recording scores a plus to the album, so if you love to collect albums from bands dealing with this kind of metal, you can bet you won't have to complain about this important aspect.