Review of the Album "Neverending Destiny" by French Death Metal Band Agressor

South France’s death metal band Agressor came out with its debut album called Neverending Destiny in 1990 and this one is not as good as Medieval Rites, not even close. The band’s name is also sometimes written as Aggressor. Their debut is a hybrid of death and thrash metal riffing and the first song called Paralytic Disease is a song that in its riff structure sounds like German thrash metal band Tankard. The vocals are a guttural style that are tough to understand and the thrash riffs are not a staccato type but they are fast. Sometimes, we feel that life isn’t worth living and there is full of pleasure and pain until our deaths. “The Unknown Spell” has riffs and lead guitar work similar to the band Mercyful Fate. For the review of 1999’s Medieval Rites album, I had used the spelling of “Agressor” but for the purposes of this review, we will use the second spelling.

Besides the musical structure of Neverending Destiny, the album’s title has much significance to it as it is explained in the title track through the lyrics. The universe is in a state of constant change and evolution as our lives on Earth are a time period that is part of this line of destiny. Life evolves through genetics as our souls are reborn after death to make way for new lives and the song tries to point out that this is part of the destiny that never ends. When I hear the song, I sense that there is also a riff style that resembles the album Never Neverland, an album that was also written in 1990.

The one big drawback to this album and band is that the vocals are very hard to decipher and understand. The vocals seem to be a lower octave version of David Vincent of the band Morbid Angel but in this case, the vocals are of such a low octave and the growls are so fast that it is pretty much impossible to understand what is being said.

The song Elemental Decay in terms of the riff structure is similar to Slayer and Canadian band Annihilator would use this kind of riffing structure especially in their late 1990’s albums though Alice in Hell has a raw sound to it as you can hear in this song as well. The album relies too much on fast, heavy distorted riffing that hardly changes much unlike the album Medieval Rites because Medieval Rites uses a lot more melodic riffing and there are acoustic parts which add a sort of progressive touch to it. This album however does not have those qualities and as a result, we will have to give it a significantly lower score than the one we gave to Medieval Rites.

Songs such as Dark Power and The Arrival lyrically are about what desires some men sometimes have as they try to use the power, a dark power by using demons and witches to try and control the world. “The Arrival” near the end of the song has riffs that resemble the 1983 song “Hit the Lights” by Metallica. Even though the lyrics of this album are dark in nature, the album is a pleasant listen overall by this longtime French band. The final score for the album Neverending Destiny is going to be 70 out of 100 points.