”The War Inside” is self-released first of all, and while that’s not really a problem per se, it furthers the demo feel of the recording. More importantly, Deus Ex Machina doesn’t seem to employ a full-time vocalist, and instead have essentially six different guest vocalists perform on the album. This is where the questions began for me. Why wouldn’t the band want to wait until they had a regular singer to release an album? While having a different vocalist on each track does keep the songs from sounding too much like each other, it also prevents the band from really forming an identity sound-wise. Basically, it causes the album to have the feel of either a compilation of several different bands, or a vocalist audition tape. The band has chops though, and the songwriting here is definitely enjoyable. When the vocalist is right, the songs sound great, as in the case of “Warmonger,” easily the best of the eight tracks, catchy, thrashy, memorable, and with vocals by Subash of Kaliyuga. “A Heretic Prayer” with vocals by Kathi of Rudra is another case where the vocals sound right, and really compliment the band. Not sure if Deus Ex Machina is considering hiring any of the vocalists on this album to be their full-time growler, but my advice would be to try very hard to get Subash, and to never let this Lord Insanity fellow anywhere near the microphone again. Deus Ex Machina have shown that they are able to write and perform intense, interesting modern thrash tunes, and I would expect that future recordings will only show improvement.