Originally written by Jordan Campbell
The Kandidate are a groove-laden, mosh-mongering Danish collective, fronted by former Hatesphere and Allhelluja throat Jacob Bredahl. And…yeah. There’s really not much to sink your teeth into here, so we’ll keep it brief.
Until We Are Outnumbered treads very familiar ground, plying a detuned death/thrash hybrid engineered for circle-pit rotation. Typically, the songs begin in raucous fashion (“gotta see some movement out there!”), but peter out towards the end as stamina drains. “Live a Lie” is the strongest slice, and “Give Up All Hope” and “Shut ’em Up” each carry some swagger, but they wear out their welcome quickly. After their initial bullrush, The Kandidate will careen into any number of stale, unoriginal potholes: a generic breakdown (“In Hell”), a flat call-and-response attempt (“Distress and Decay”), or misguided talkthroughs a la The Haunted (the aforementioned “Live A Lie”). While The Kandidate do deserve props for adding a bit of crusty flavor–of both the hardcored and Stockholm’d variety–it feels tacked-on rather than inherent. The songs simply aren’t strong enough to take advantage of the applied aesthetic.
While admirably deviant from the typically over-polished death/thrash/groove pack, Until We Are Outnumbered’s best track is a two-minute instrumental, and that’s never a good sign. At this juncture, The Kandidate are a little too brick-headed for the elite, but too dirty and jagged for the typical Wall of Death lemming. It’s unfortunate, but these songs are as unthreatening as the band’s moniker, and without the (very modest) name recognition of Bredahl, it’s doubtful the band would’ve broken free of the localized scrum.
