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When Howard Jones departed from Killswitch Engage in 2012 for health reasons, many people (including this reviewer) thought that Jones’ would disappear from the world of metal, and music in general. However, with Francesco Artusato (All Shall Perish) and former Devolved/Divine Heresy drummer John Sankey beside him, Jones’ has returned with new kinda-supergroup Devil You Know.

With the musicians coming from various metal backgrounds from metalcore, deathcore, industrial metal, etc for their debut album The Beauty of Destruction, it’s hard not to be disappointed at the fairly generic stylings of the band.


To say that Devil You Know are almost a poor man’s version of Killswitch Engage would be fairly close to the mark. While certainly heavier than the frontman’s prior band material, most of it fails to have themselves same level of hooks and memorability that Jones’ former act possessed.

It almost sounds like the band are taking all their cues from a songwriting 101 class. It features all the hallmarks of good tunes, but only a handful of them actually hit the spot. The rest are almost instantly forgettable.

Speaking positively though, Artusato is a fantastic lead guitarist and is certainly in the same vein as Jeff Loomis et al. Just check out his tasteful shred solos on “For The Dead and Broken.” But he isn’t as strong in the riff department, with a lot of the tracks made up of fairly generic Gothenburg riffs and machine-gun chugs.

Jones’ singing is as strong as it’s ever been, and the time he spent off hasn’t taken any of his soaring baritone range. The man-mountain vocalist’s impassioned cleans are epic as ever, while his screams and growls are more brutal than we’ve heard from him in a long time, harkening back to his time in Blood Has Been Shed.

There are definitely a handful of big tunes on the record, “Shut It Down” and “Seven Years Alone” are obvious highlights, and “A New Beginning” is a cracking album opener, but all in all it’s just not wholly exciting and satisfying collection of songs.

The Beauty of Destruction is certainly better than Jones’ final album with Killswitch Engage (2009’s woeful self-titled effort), but for a group of fantastic musicians, Devil You Know never really lives up to its large potential, and the band seem a little too happy playing it safe within their comfort zone. The Beauty of Destruction is a fairly flat and frustratingly dull album that could have been so much more,

(released April 29, 2014 on Nuclear Blast Records)