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On Behind Silence and Solitude he sounds too perfect, replicating the same clean bark literally one syllable at a time for an hour. Still, I can’t deny the man’s talent: he screams with tactical precision. This is a man so heinously stupid with his choice of words that he has prompted me to question the few ideological aspects we share by virtue of his speaking about them. Phil Labonte is a technically near-flawless vocalist who suffers from a complete lack of performing personality while in his private life being cut from the same douchebag cloth that too many metal elder statesmen are. As I Lay Dying write boring songs with decent intros (Seriously, “When This World Fades” is awful, but the first 20 seconds belong on an Opeth album), and have from the very beginning. Aside from attitude, there’s not much going on. While the rest of the band is trying to play Pantera riffs, Lambesis is snarling the same way Nergal was at the same time - maybe that’s why he’s at the top of the mix. There’s more American death metal in their formula than on the other albums on this list, as evidenced by the burly guitar tone and especially Lambesis’s vocals. To the band’s credit, they sound aggressive here. Beneath the Encasing of Ashes sounds rough compared to the band’s later output, but also sounds pretty slick compared to its peers at this time. Those habits present themselves on their first album as well. Their take on the style struck me as too repetitive and overly reliant on unpleasant brickwalled production. I never liked As I Lay Dying, even before frontman Tim Lambesis was convicted of soliciting his wife’s murder.