After reading their bio, I feel ashamed that I never heard of Devious before. These guys shared stages with Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Vader, Darkane, Crowbar, Aborted, The Dillinger Escape Plan, God Dethroned, Malevolent Creation, Dying Fetus and Krisiun! They exist since 2000 and they come from Hengelo, The Netherlands. In 2002 they recorded a self-financed EP and in 2003 they released their debut full-lenght on Spitzenburg Records, titled Acts of Rage. Now it’s time for their second record, Domain, distributed by new label Deity Down Records.

The album opens up with a tension-building instrumental intro which immediately makes clear that this is a very quality record. The production is perfect and the introduction itself is even better.. melodies and samples take you along to the entrance gate of Devious’ ‘domain’. Now, the tension was high, but it wasn’t hard to guess what was up next.. pure heaviness! ‘Room 302’ begins with some modern death/thrash riffs, but not long after, pure death metal takes over. Devious’ sound is technical, brutal, fast and thrashy, simply tagged as ‘very aggresive’.

After four uptempo tracks, Devious calms down a little bit with a guitar intermission called ‘Souived Pt. II’. Of course to be followed with yet another great devastating track. The whole record is just so un-Dutch. We sure have some nice bands in this country, but a fantastic production like this is unheard in its genre. I would compare Devious with death/thrash bands from Scandinavia such as Deathchain from Finland and Impious from Sweden, mixed with the Polish tech-death sound from for example Deivos. A good example is ‘Misanthropic Entities’ which includes all these ingredients: the technical sound, but most of all outrageous fast and grooving.

Devious made an excellent product. First of all the sound and production itselves, but also the artwork and the booklet look very nice. They also added their videoclip for ‘Room 302’ as bonus on the cd. Now I’m very curious about their live performance. I’m pretty sure that their music leads to big moshpits, and the names that they’ve been playing with say enough of course. I’m not sure if they are still on the No Mercy Easter Festival-bill, but if they are, they are a must-checkout!