The third album by American speed metal crew
Cannae is their best yet, a mixture of riff-crazy speed thrash (complete with some of the most breakneck blast drumming you've ever heard, courtesy of new guy Colin Conway), double-bass low-end throb, and highly technical, melodic guitar solos. By refusing to stick to one narrowly defined subset of metal,
Cannae neatly avoid the listener fatigue that often sets in with metal albums; singer Adam DuLong even mixes up his delivery between songs, switching between the standard grindcore growl and a more hardcore, hectoring delivery, sometimes between verses in the same song. Though the album doesn't continue the breathless pace set by the opening salvo, "Rats, Snakes and Thieves,"
Gold Becomes Sacrifice maintains its vitality throughout, ending strong with the brutal thrash of "Fear and Panic." Though what they're doing is only slightly different from the material of literally dozens of other bands, there's a freshness to
Gold Becomes Sacrifice, perhaps due to the wholesale personnel changes that preceded this album. ~ Stewart Mason