Shogun

Following up their outstanding Iconoclast full-length, What Sin Has Twisted is a four-song EP that builds upon Iconoclast’s impressive musical foundation. Shogun’s mixture of complex metallic hardcore with black and death influences as sung by an even more maniacal Jeff Walker-inspired vocalist is taken to new extremes and mixed with previous untapped ideas and tangents. "Missionary Impulse” opens with a serene, melodic passage before violently segueing into a stoner/doom riff, of course filtered through Shogun’s eyes, before returning to more familiarly tread Shogun territory. This is a musical thread explored throughout What Sin Has Twisted, with Shogun adding more elements of traditional power metal and melodic thrash to its blackened technical excursions and emotional moments. Comparisons to peers such as Cave In, Converge and even Dillinger can still be made in parts ("On The Stake,” for example), but Shogun’s sonic assimilating of other extreme metallic influences has done much for staking their own identity. Shogun has also begun to appropriate old school metal’s penchant for the grandiose, throwing around even more harmonised leads and runs and exploring more overtly dramatic-sounding segments ("King for a Day,” "The Pull”). This synthesis works extraordinarily well, making Shogun a band crashing against the confines of a genre instead of being defined by it.