The Inside

Destinity have been around long enough to establish themselves with a worldwide base, but on their sixth full-length album what's remarkable is how much and how readily they suggest the context in which they first emerged. Throughout The Inside, there's a feeling of the mid-'90s recombined and frozen in amber, the band's deft way around aggressive, tech-heavy metal suggesting — perhaps inevitably — not only countrymen like Treponem Pal but acts like Ministry, Machine Head, Misery Loves Co., and Fear Factory. It's no bad listen at all, certainly, but something about the band's sound seems out of place in 2008, at once appreciated and still strange to hear. As a result, few of the songs on The Inside stand out on their own, with their most memorable moments appearing only in bursts, much like the occasional keyboards adding what now seems like the required element of prog-derived pomp (though on "Thing I Will Never Feel" it almost suggests Depeche Mode, at least as refracted through that band's now well-established metal fan base). The band's aimed-for grandeur only really hits in full by the time of the sixth song, "Inhuman Corrosive Report," but the rest of the time the group seems content to cook up serviceable song titles ("Murder Within," "Enemy Process") and performances that never stick as hard in the memory as they would hope to.