By Jonathan Smith
Hailing from Santiago, Chile, Thornafire have offered up a slab of death metal that has some very impressive moments but that mostly comes off as being fairly monotonous. The first three tracks rumble alone just fine, but are pretty much indistinguishable in their similarity to each other. It’s with tracks such as “Otredad” and “Confesión” that the album reveals its true potential. Both songs have very different rhythms and structures but both just beg to played live while greeted with a wall of banging heads, and they’re the kind of stuff with which Thornafire shine on Vorex Deconstrucción. The final track, “De La Destrucción Al Trono,” ends halfway through its running time, and the rest of the track that is found after the moment of silence feels like an unnecessary cap on what was a perfectly fine closer. Alexis Muñoz grumbles and growls over the music with admirable ease, but at times the barked vocals sound out of synch with the music enough as to be distracting. Víctor MacNamara’s guitars bring a nice solid crunch to the sound, and Juan Pablo Donoso’s drumming is solid. A few of the small touches found here are welcome, but some of the instrumental touches end up sounding pretty cheesy. Big death metal fans will likely want to give Vorex Deconstrucción a shot, but others might find it repetitive as a whole despite its stronger moments.
(Ibex Moon)
