The Toxic Touch

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After ruffling conservative feathers for years with their confrontational moniker, Holland's God Dethroned proceeded to rile up some of their fans with 2006's Toxic Touch — their most "commercial" album thus far. Still, this was a far cry from constituting any form of sell-out, but rather a culmination of the long-running death metal band's maturation from musical provocateurs to seasoned songwriters, capable of concocting truly memorable tunes out of their coarse base materials. And so, even the harshest onslaughts heard here (see "2014," "On Wings of Pestilence," etc.) feature distinctive melodies threading their way through the chaos, or else taking a dominant role in a preponderance of more measured numbers like "The Day You Died," "Fail to Exist," and the synth-enhanced "Macabre World" — all of which still crunch and grind far more aggressively than the Gothenburg death metal bands, it should be noted. A slightly more rhythmic, groove-laden approach also makes a dent on cuts like "Hating Life" and "Falling Down" but, likewise, observers would have to be out of their gourd to associate any of it with nu-metal. And one would hope that whatever gripes die-hard fans might have against the general loss of extremism would be silenced by the elevated song-crafting throughout, as epitomized by the irresistible emotional climax achieved on "Typhoid Mary, which is as disconcerting as it is seductive. More than anything, it reflects the striking contrast of hard/soft elements that keep metal heads mesmerized year after year, and for which God Dethroned have shown an amazing talent over the course of their career.