I first heard Arcane Deception when they were opening for scribe at the Mezz last year, and to be honest I didn’t really like them very much, and was anxiously waiting for them to finish their set, so when I found out that I had to review their album, I wasn’t really expecting much, But surprisingly it turned out to be pretty good.

Arcane Deception are a four piece from Delhi consisting of Manu Tyagi(Vocals/Bass)  Saurabh Seth(Guitars)Kshitij Banerjee(Keyboards)  and Siddharth Kaushik (Drums). Their sound can be best described as  Guitar driven  melodic  metal similar to bands  like Children of Bodom ,Norther  and to some extent Arch enemy   with strong progressive elements, and also a slight element of groove, That being  said, lets dissect their sound a little more. The guitar riffs on this album are very old school reminding  me of 80’s  power metal bands like Stratovarious and Hell-o-ween , although  you do hear a  slight  level  of modernity  in some songs like  Ghost in the Ghetto  and the breakdown in  Arcane Deception, the title track which comes in the form of  very  Groove Metal, Pantera-Ish riffs. Siddharth’s Drums   are very simplistic and blend in to the songs very well without being utterly complex reminding me of the drumming in Mercenary. But the Star of the show is definitely Kshitij , with his innovative  keyboard playing. He feels free to improvise and do something new rather than simply following along, also his keyboard playing makes the band’s sound as a whole very grand; In fact he plays a central role in giving the band’s sound a progressive nature.

The vocals were probably the weak point of this album, it’s not that they were badly done but for an album like this,   the vocals should be diverse, which unfortunately doesn’t happen here. Manu  Growls most of the time although you do here him sing clean in Arcane Deception, there were other times too where I thought that his growls weren’t fitting in a particular part of a song and a clean approach would have been better. But other than that I think this   is a pretty  good album  which is a definitely something that  fans of  Melodic, Keyboard driven metal should check out , I can definitely see a lot of potential in this band  which I am sure   I will in the coming  years (6/10)

Download ‘Arcane Deception’ album here