Two years ago, The Sun gave a Test Spin to Arsis’ We are the Nightmare, a devilish little technical death metal album with some noisy, messy drums and songwriter/guitarist James Malone’s rekindled sense of melody amidst some unnecessarily showy sweep picking. Eager anticipation of Malone’s progression, and Arsis’ for that matter, was a given.

The new decade brings us Starve for the Devil, and it’s safe to say no one saw this coming. Gone is the ADD-infused percussionist of the past, and returning to the fold is original skin-man Mike Van Dyne, who injects the album with much-needed energy through his combination of heavy pounding beats, controlled restraint, and signature double-bass drum barrages. And the album’s production has eschewed Nightmare’s paper-thin veneer for every ounce of crunch the band’s poor amps could muster.

More surprisingly, the band has shifted gears and styles almost entirely. Song titles like “Forced to Rock” and “Half Past Corpse O’ Clock” suggest tongue-in-rotted-cheek extreme metal cheesiness, ranging somewhere between the idiocy of Children of Bodom and the puzzling last Carcass album, Swansong. The music is now a streamlined version of heavy power metal influenced thrash. All attempts at masturbatory technical death have been wiped aside. Blast beats are few, and sweep picking solos are even rarer. Dear God, how many times must they say “It’s time to rock!” or the equivalent?

Perhaps Arsis finally decided to respond to the fan backlash, the angry voices who missed the band’s original thrash-death-black metal hybrid of yore, increasingly disillusioned with the direction of mindless complexity bordering on un-musicality their releases were taking. “Beyond Forlorn” is for those fans. So is “Closer to Cold,” with its melodic tremolo picking and mournful outro, and so is ferocious closer “Sable Rising.”

So it’s still not their masterful debut, A Celebration of Guilt, by any stretch. It’s starting to look like nothing ever will be.