THE FRAGILE ART OF EXISTENCE

Chuck Schuldiner is most famous in metal circles for his work with death - and rightly so - but Control Denied's sole completed album was actually his studio swansong. The Control Denied project was an exercise by Chuck in taking the chops and aggression he had honed over his years in Death and using it in a progressive metal framework taking a sort of death-tinged power metal style as the foundation of the group's sound.

It's an intriguing experiment, and broadly speaking it works out well. With a number of Death and ex-Death members onboard, there was a risk that this would have just been a Death album with clean vocals, but the differing musical approach allows the album to stand as a record of a somewhat different side of Chuck's creativity, and we can all be grateful that he and the crew got it on record before we lost him.