Point blank, Two (Poverty) is a supreme album. Where Demiricous was initially founded on the tomfoolery and outright stupidity of watching too many Slayer and Pantera tour videos featuring juvenile shit like bashing cars with baseball bats and setting stuff on fire, they’ve refined themselves into an actual band… and a fucking powerful one at that. As far as sophomore albums go, Two (Poverty) obliterates the band’s debut effort with one simple E chord and refuses to relent, smashing the remaining pieces into dust. Every one of the dozen songs is an aural onslaught of blast beats, low-end chugging and guttural vocal delivery clearly culled from the aforementioned late-’80s-early-’90s thrash metal influences, but tweaked just enough to sound fresh. When not blazing, tracks such as opener “Never Enough Road” and “Knuckle Eye” have a guttural soul to them that is patiently mid-tempo but furious all the same. Breaking out into double-time beats and raging guitar solos, these same tracks reveal an animal — well, four of them — that attacks with the ravenousness of a beast freshly rabid. While these guys were in danger of being written off with the mediocrity of their first album, they’ve gotten the goofiness out of their system, honed and refined their vision, lending a vicious directness to this effort. They have set the bar extraordinarily high for metal in 2008.