Some bands manage to get out of their dreaded hometowns, while others aren’t so fortunate. The latter proved to be the fate of Acton, Maine metallic hardcore act The Year Of Our Lord, who between 1997-2003 were bastions in the emerging New England hardcore/metal scene, haunting venues around the Northeastern U.S., down south, as well as in Europe with their confrontational yet reflective strain of blackened death metal. The story has been heard numerous times before; had they just stuck it out a little longer, they would have made it. While the truth to these claims as pertaining to other bands throughout the history of metal and rock cannot be substantiated here, it most definitely applies to the virtually-undiscovered The Year Of Our Lord. The wait fans had to endure for the band’s epic, double-disc swansong “Dead To You” to finally hit the presses is a sort of deprivation torture few devoted followers of a band should ever have to endure. Let’s just put it this way: Guns’n’Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” is a perfect example of how NOT to come back into the scene; with a new band, new style, and near-total alienation of their remaining fanbase praying for another November Rain to fall. Leave it to The Year Of Our Lord to show everyone the proper way to come back after making fans wait just a tad too long. “Dead To You” is much more than merely a complete discography with fancy packaging; it sees the band in fighting form unlike anyone could have expected after being gone for over seven years. All of the music on “Dead To You” was not merely re-mastered; new parts were recorded, including keys by producer Pete Rutcho that resonate infinitely more than on the original recordings, and freshly-recorded drum tracks by Colin Conway, drummer/co-songwriting wiz kid of Prosthetic Recording artists Cannae as well as the more experimental Frozen, who was also The Year Of Our Lord’s touring drummer during their final two years of existence. The songs were put through the best body shop a band could ask for at Damage Studios in Massachusetts, an increasingly prominent recording facility run by longtime friend Rutcho, who brought to life Boston thrash act Revocation’s latest “Existence Is Futile,” as well as having just wrapped up recording The Ghost Inside’s hotly-anticipated new album “Returner,” and in recent years working with Unearth, Bury Your Dead, Cannae, Seemless, The Classic Struggle, and dozens more. While there is no costly multi-fold digipak to speak of on The Year Of Our Lord’s new release “Dead To You,” reportedly and unsurprisingly, it was a costly project to assemble. Most investments in music are these days. But now that it has finally seen the light of day, all of the band’s classic material, much of which was moshed and screamed along to in basements and halls in New England’s underground extreme music scene around the turn of the century, can be appreciated anew and in a completely different light. The guitars cut through everything while vocals grind along like teeth, all over a punchy yet sturdy Colin Conway drum performance, likely the Boston skin-basher’s longest single recorded piece of music to date. Between the band actually putting their hearts into this project, a fact that can be heard from the single note of disc one until the self-titled album closer on disc two, and Rutcho bringing a sonically impressive, Devin Townsend-like production job to “Dead To You,” The Year Of Our Lord with this album prove they predated and/or wrote bleaker and more moving blackened melodic death metal than Nachtmystium, Darkest Hour, even Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir.