Add to that an incredibly clean (but not overly slick) production by Bruce Fitzhugh (vocalist for Living Sacrifice) and guest vocals by both Fitzburg and Josh Scogin (The Chariot), and this starts to seem like your average Solid State release.
While the lyrics seem to follow on the heels of power metal (and in fact, the layout and general theme to this album seems to be Sonata Arctica mixed with a bit of Southern metal flair), you can easily detect a strong Christian element running here. For one, this band is pretty straight-forward about their beliefs. Just before writing this, I decided to see if I could find some of their lyrics online, and came across a few reviews from some higher profile sites, and I was glad to see that staunch metal sites were giving this CD the time of day and were even rating it quite high. The Showdown are five guys from a state I've never care to visit, but their talent makes me wonder just how they got where they are today. Needless to say, this is a damn fine record, but you're probably asking "Who is this band and what makes them so great" And even if you're not, I don't give a shit, simply because this is way better than anything you may preconceive this as being. When I first visited my family back home for a week in December, I made sure to tell my kid brother about this band right off the bat, only to find that the record store he worked at already received a promo copy of this as well, and he was just as stoked about it as I was. But holy shit would I be pissed if I never got a chance to listen to The Showdown or A Chorus Of Obliteration. I've never heard of their label, and I've never heard a thing about Elizabethton, TN where these guys are from. I don't know what bands they used to be in, or if they've been into metal for long, or if they're just a bunch of metal, child-prodigies fresh out of high-school (actually, I've sort of ruled that one out).
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