City of Dis is the debut album from Oakland, California's The Mass, who combine thrash, math metal, hardcore, and jazz into an artful amalgam. The lurching, jagged stop/go riffing of Dillinger Escape Plan is the order of the day, but the riffs themselves are typically more thrash based. The band is amazingly tight and performs with a great deal of precision. This is topped with the manic hardcore vocals of Matt Waters, who also plays saxophone. The sax is present in every song, but not throughout the songs. Instead, Waters picks his moments and provides accompaniment in the style a dual guitarist, or contributes wildly frenetic solos, which sound aggressive and spastic enough to put to rest any doubts regarding the testicular fortitude of the band. If Morphine played metal it would sound something like this.
01 Porc 02 Trapped under a ice 03 Hex by hex 04 Major strip 05 Buttlip 06 Treadmill of suffering 07 We enslaved elves to build our death machine 08 Marca dos invernos 09 We enslaved elves to build our death machine [live][*][multimedia track