TEN MILE BURIAL – Portrait Of The Digger

Ten Mile Burial is a four-man Metal band from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Their independent release Portrait Of The Digger is their debut offering to the music world. The disc is nine tracks long and has a playing time of 36 minutes.

Ten Mile Burial isn’t a fancy band by any stretch: they’re loud, in your face, and don’t have a lot of subtlety, preferring instead to pummel you with lots of heavy riffs from guitarist Nate Coleman and forceful, often guttural vocals provided by Shawn Rossi. These guys won’t win any style points for what they’re doing on this album, but they probably wouldn’t want any.

Still, the band is good at what they do, with Coleman coming up with enough solid, churning riffs to keep things chugging along nicely, and he also throws in some interesting guitar lines and solos to liven up the proceedings. And although he’s not a great technical singer, Rossi manages to get your attention with his at-times snarly vocals.

Portrait Of The Digger is a fairly listenable album, but it doesn’t sound all that different from the many other “Modern Metal discs floating around out there”. Nearly all of the songs are slow to mid-paced in terms of speed, and eventually they all end up sounding the same. None of the songs are bad, but you’ll find yourself wishing they were just a little bit better, and maybe more lively and energetic. To give credit where credit is due, though, “Doom” is a cool song, with some nice heavy riffing and catchy Death Metal-ish vocals used to spruce things up. If more of the album’s songs were like this one, it would have been better overall.

For an independent release, Portrait Of The Digger has a solid production, with only the uninspiring cover art giving away the fact that this album isn’t a major-label disc. It’s a good effort on the production side of things for the most part; it sounds a bit rough and raw, but it also doesn’t sound like it was recorded at the bottom of a swamp.

Portrait Of The Digger is a not-bad debut from Ten Mile Burial; they certainly have talent and potential. The album’s not all that it could be, but it isn’t a waste of time. It’s worth a listen, even if only to show your support for independent Metal.