(Today our contributor Zoltar brings us reviews of five recently released or reissued OSDM albums, and you’ll find them all below.)
FRIGHTFUL – WHAT LIES AHEAD
Being smart doesn’t hurt does it? Especially in this highly competitive world… So kudos to Gdansk’s Frightful for realizing soon enough that the grind/death direction they were initially stirring their band to could well be a dead end, at least based on their lacklustre 2018 EP Cannibalistic Rites. Their second full-length What Lies Ahead takes what made their debut album Spectral Creator so great back in 2021 and just runs with it at full speed. At its very core, their music is pure death/thrash mayhem with that kind of inimitable sense of urgency, somewhere in between Schizophrenia-era Sepultura and mid-period Sodom.
Yet what truly make this one special, apart sadly from the rather plastic-sounding drum sound, is how in the meantime they’ve draped themselves in some silky, velvet-colored cape to howl at the moon. Intricate melodies, bleak intros (check out the title-track), and twin harmonies are aplenty, while Oskar Wańka’s croaked voice (think of a more pissed-off version of Kreator’s Mille Petrozza) is drenched in echo, as if reverberating from some lost cave deep down in the woods.
In a way, they’re following one of their main influence examples, aka Merciless. Although people tend to solely focus, and rightfully so, on their 1989 debut The Awakening – an album which solely wrote the Scandinavian death/thrash book – latter albums like 1994’s Unbound saw them embracing the darkness and letting some black metal elements creep in. And that’s exactly what Frightful are doing here, adding an extra push and with the kind of class which gets them closer to Dissection’s The Somberlain. If it wasn’t for that too-mechanical snare sound and its second-half slightly diminishing intensity, this would be an all-around winner but we’re being picky here, as overall What Lies Ahead is one killer blackened melodic thrash/death album.
https://www.facebook.com/Frightfulband
https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/album/what-lies-ahead
HUMANITY DELETE – HAIL THE BLOOD FATHER
When even the man himself has lost count longtime ago and easily confesses he doesn’t even himself know how many records he’s put out since the late ’90s, it’s easy to get confused. Yes, Rogga Johansson – aka ‘the busiest man in Swedish death metal’ – can write and record an album as fast as your grandma cooking her world-famous (at least, according to you) apple pie on a lazy Sunday afternoon. And yes, among the 100+ (or something like that) records he’s put out over his career, you’ll find as much actual killer stuffs (most of Paganizer discography, Putrevore, Ribspreader etc.) as quickly-thrown-quickly-forgotten disposable one-offs (Graveyard After Graveyard, Catacomb, To Descend etc.), to the point where it’s objectively difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Especially when some, just like Humanity Delete, fall exactly in the middle.
Some would sum it up as just another Rogga Johansson pedestrian death metal album, and in a way that’s what it is. For a start, this is another solo project in the truest sense of the word, as Johansson handles everything here, with only the mix and mastering job being handled by his friend and long-term collaborator Håkan Stuvemark from Wombbath. Two, this was originally initiated back in 2012 as a favor to his friend Jill Girardi. Along with Billy Nocera and their well-respected Razorback imprint, she was the one suggesting Johansson started off spreading his wings outside of his Paganizer household by releasing the first two (and best) Revolting albums in 2009 and 2010. Knowing how productive the man was and looking for her very first release to help her kickstart Dead Beat Media, she asked him to provide her with an album of classic death metal and the Swede gladly obliged.
Dead Beat Media sadly didn’t last long but Humanity Delete did, Hail The Blood Father being its fifth full-length. Somewhat true to his original word, this new 35-minutes long album is another inaugural release for a brand-new label, Bloodfront Records, ran by former Dead End bass player Alwin Roes, who already put out several Rogga-related projects (Stygian Dark, Heir Corpse One, To The Gallows) through his other label, Doc Records.
Aptly suggested by its booklet to-the-bone simple design, this is, indeed, a by-the-numbers Rogga Johansson album, with thirteen mostly mid-paced and slightly melodic in places Scandinavia-meets-the-US numbers, enlightened by a few scattered solos (although he isn’t credited, we suspect Stuvemark to have put his mark here, just like he did on the last Revolting) and Johansson‘s massive growl.
You could argue that only the hardcore Johansson fan will see a difference in between this one and the 76 albums he’s released over the last year so and its true values probably lie in the eye of the beholder. But while it doesn’t have the grand dynamics of Paganizer‘s latter works nor the ambitious scope of, say, the upcoming Eye Of Purgatory (watch this space), let’s say it’s one of his recent years’ best examples of what could be defined as ‘basic takeaway death metal’. Yep, just like a good burger with extra cheese on top and its extra portion of fries you just picked up on our way back home because you felt way too tired to be bothered cooking in the first place. It won’t change the world and will be as quickly forgotten as it is ingested but damn does it feel good for fifteen minutes or so to stuff yourself up with it.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563076254581
STASS – NEW DEAD WORLD
Unlike Humanity Delete, it’s a bit more surprising to see Stass landing on Bloodfront Records, considering his main character status in Europe, or at least Germany. It may not be obvious from a non-European perspective but at some point, let’s say at the tail-end of the ’90s, Crematory (the German one, not the Swedish cult outfit) were kind of a big thing on the old continent, that is if you were into that sort of (now) a tad cheesy mix of mainstream death metal and goth, with more honeyed keyboards and leather dress that would instantly make a goregrind fan have a heart attack.
Felix Stass remains to this day their frontman and a solid, if a bit a generic, growler if you strip away all the sweat he’s usually covered with. Probably looking for some street cred, he teamed up with Rogga Johansson – the go-to guy if you need somebody to quickly come up with an album tailor-made for your needs, like he did with Kam Lee in Massacre or Marc Grewe in Leper Colony – and came up with two love letters to classic Swedish death as Stass, The Darkside in 2017 and the far more efficient Songs Of Flesh And Decay in 2021.
The fact that they’ve already gone through three labels despite their singer profile probably says a lot, and New Dead World Order‘s direction won’t help either. It’s not a bad album per se but dropping the whole SweDeath concept and going for a broader and more common sound strip away their main selling point.
Johansson had already messed around to greater effect with a more American type of style (think Sinister meets Malevolent Creation) with the little known if pretty cool Monstrous and is hindered by a misbalanced mix which puts those mechanical-sounding drums above the guitars. The staff he gathered around him though – incl. former The Project Hate MCMXCIX drummer Thomas Ohlsson and shredder Kjetil Lynghaug – are solid players, and the joy of playing death metal is palpable, down to a nod to Cannibal Corpse’s ‘Hammer Smashed-Face’ intro on ‘The Talking Dead’ first notes.
Not too brutal nor too melodic, the new Stass ends up being one of those ‘middle-of-the-road’ records one can easily enjoy but as easily forget. A bit like Humanity Delete then, yet a notch below.
https://www.facebook.com/stassband
PROCREATION – GHOSTWOOD
Out of all the Doc Records-related Bloodfront records the imprint sent us, the most satisfying might be the reissue of Procreation‘s 2014 debut Ghostwood. Originally self-released in 250 copies and then rereleased a first time in 2016 by Vic Records, this third edition boosts a new, more obscure cover artwork and two extra live tracks.
Like their label mates, these Dutch veterans (most notably guitar player Ronald Louwsma, who played with cult death/doom outfit Beyond Belief in the second half of the ’90s) don’t even bother finding an excuse for playing classic death metal yet offer here a quite revigorating spin on Vomitory and especially Vader no-frills-in-your-face-tight-as-fuck approach, down to the vocals which sound like a more guttural version of Piotr Wiwczarek, yet with some strident black metal riffing (‘Death Is My Beat’ whose lyrics were inspired by Michael Connelly’s book The Poet) tucked in for good measures.
But it’s really the undeniable drive behind the music that makes all the difference and it really urged me to check out the band’s latest album The Grand Inquisitor released two years ago, although Ghostwood vocalist Mark Ketelaar, who since joined the recently reunited Ceremony, is no longer fronting the band. And you should too!
http://www.procreationmetal.com/
SUMMONING DEATH – TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD
Let’s say they haven’t read the memo shall we? Sure thing, HP Lovecraft and the Great Horned One firmly remain at the top list of extreme metal sources of lyrical inspiration but somebody should have told Cancún’s Summoning Death that, first, Cathedral with the song ‘Night Of The Seagulls’ back in 1995 on their third album Carnival Bizarre and then Hooded Menace, who basically based their whole concept on them, were there first as far as referencing 1972’s cheesy yet cult horror movie Tombs Of The Blind Dead and its cohort of templar zombies.
Besides, despite what one could think based on the album’s title or its artwork, only the title-track is solely dedicated to Amando de Ossorio’s most famed creation, the rest of the songs portraying instead various serial-killers without any specific references to known movies, unlike on their first two albums.
To those who’ve been following these veterans ever since they were initially conjured by Shub Niggurath‘s drummer (although he quickly dropped out) and former DENIAL and NECROCCULTUS bass player Ricardo Gill back in 2014, little has changed musically speaking, even if while still embracing the early Swedish and Finnish death metal down-tuned sound, they’ve upped their game a bit, quite often opting for a kind of forlorn and almost doom-like tempo (check out the gruesome seven minutes of ‘Camp Sleepaway’) where they truly excel. Abigail Paz‘ vocals may lack variation and so do the riffs but they make it up for it with a newfound knack for simple, catchy, and dare we say melodic hooks (‘Humongous’) and the sort of blind dedication to the genre’s classic roots that many Mexican (i.e., some of the most dieheard metal maniacs out there) bands display. And when all the stars align, as on ‘Intruder’, they’re really onto something.
https://summoningdeath.bandcamp.com/
https://chaos-records.bandcamp.com/album/tombs-of-the-blind-dead