This is what's excellent on Trials' album, "Witness to the Downfall": ‘Shadows and Traps’, ‘This is Starvation’, and the final acoustic minute of ‘And Still I Breathe’, the latter of which sounds like the band hacked into Mikael Akerfeldt's studio hard drive and stole the recording. These three pieces are truly impressive bits of thrash and prog; otherwise, there's not much good, bad, or ugly on this record. Even the first 5 minutes of ‘And Still I Breathe’ are pretty disposable, until the triumphant finish.

The bastard child of Pantera, Metallica, Machine Head, and Strapping Young Lad, Trials have the potential to take these noble influences and forge something important in their genre sometime in the future. For the present, however, vocalist Mark Sugar, apes Phil Anselmo closely enough to be distracting, and mediocre outweighs the strong. Those shining moments are good enough, however, to keep watching this band. I'm sure there's more good stuff to come.