BYZANTINE, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, SOUND LIKE PANTERA NOW

Byzantine have posted two new songs, “Nadir” and “Expansion and Collapse,” on their MySpace page. The songs are our first taste of their forthcoming album, Oblivion Beckons, and, like just about every other group putting out new material these days, the band’s goal here seems to be to sound as much like Pantera as possible. And as much as we love Pantera, that’s actually kinda too bad, because we really dug their melodious tech-core sound of old.

But let’s reserve judgement for the final product. The album was s’posed to come out last month, but now has a tentative release date of January ’08.

-AR