Emerald Weapon - Part II: Earth Encrypted

Its our buddies from the PNW back at us with a new recording. I was kinda tepid on their S/T EP. There were a lot of flaws in it, and a shit ton of improvements that needed to be made, but there were some bright spots in the songwriting, especially the guitars. Now we have their second release. Most of the complaints I had have been addressed. The songs seem to flow better, the mixing is improving at a good rate (the exception is the hi-hat, which needs to be reigned in a little, because it overpowers the rest of the drum track and even bleeds into the main focus), and the guys seem to want to be seen as standard Cascadian black metal no more. The drone part of their sound seems to fit more naturally as well. However, "Cement Rivers" suffers from a problem their last EP had in general; the song ends rather abruptly, it doesn't seem to flow to a natural end. This is only a minor setback to what, in my opinion, is a great follow-up recording. Let this be a reference point if you are looking for a band that matured naturally in a very short span of time.