DEATH'S DESIGN

Diabolical Masquerade's most widely-praised album is a rapid-fire mishmash of musical genres, presented as the soundtrack to an imaginary film. Pay little attention to the track listing, because the various movements and songs within each movement seem to have been assigned to the work arbitrarily - as arbitrary, in fact, as the shifts between genres exhibited by the work itself. It's an impressive enough stunt, though to be honest the album as a whole never really grabs me - a lot of rough ideas are presented but they're never developed to the point where they really take off. It's still an entertaining listen thanks to its rapidly-changing texture, but it does rather rely on this basic gimmick a bit too much to become a true classic.