"How to do Battle" is the forth musical release from the UK’s very own Senser and is an album that is a little bit surprising to say the least. When researching this band in order to write this review my attention was drawn to their website (obviously), With the news page showing a feed regarding an interview on Bruce Dickinson’s Radio 6 show. Immediately I assumed that they were going to be a Metal band. I was soon to find that it’s not quite that simple.

Senser seem to have their musical ideas rooted in a lot of genres. The second you hit play on "How To Do Battle" you are thrown into a heavy metal guitar riff and the aforementioned Bruce Dickinson interview started to make sense. I will warn you however that this opener (not including the album intro) is rather deceiving. Aside from a few guitar riffs sprinkled with a number of pinched harmonics, this almost instantly morphs into something very similar to the new metal genre we experienced at the turn of the century.

I am a big fan of both Metal and Rap/Hip-Hop as individual genres, but unfortunately they very rarely appeal to me as a musical collaboration (Linkin Park and Jay-z creating "Collision Course" would be my number one culprits in this argument). I will say that this album did explore a more intense side of both genres, giving it a bit more of a non-mainstream feel. That said though I did feel that the intro was very misleading as mentioned, as it deteriorated afterwards almost entirely into a Hip-hop record.

I will say that "How To Do Battle" is a good musical creation from a music creator/producers point of view but I do feel that the way that it was put together and marketed could have been handled a little better. If you were a fan of Rage Against The Machine in their hay-day then maybe you would find this a good listen but it probably would have worked a little better if it weren’t so focused on the Rap/Hip-hop side of things.