About a month ago we featured some brutal death metal crafted for the purpose of putting you in the right frame of mind for pumping iron in the gym and destroying emo posers at the same time. The name of the project was One Handed Skull Crushing. It was a side project of three musicians in Sweden, though at the time we didn’t divulge their main projects.

It’s now time to do that, at least for one of them. The more serious musical endeavor of bass player Axel Berglund is a Gothenburg band called One Inch Giant, and that band has just self-released their debut album, Malva. The musical style is dramatically different from that of OHSC, and although it may not appeal to all fans of the skull-crushers’ music, I’m been having lots of fun listening to it. As you can see, the album art is also wonderful. It’s by an artist named Emma Ekstam, and it depicts the small realm of Malva, in which all the phenomena described in the lyrics take place. To see more of Ms. Ekstam’s eye candy, go here.

I suppose the music of One Inch Giant is best described as stoner metal, though within that general genre description the six songs on Malva display considerable variety, and you don’t need unusual bladder control to get through them. All the singing is clean and all the songs are distinctively melodic. In fact, some of you might classify some of the songs as bluesy rock instead of metal, though all of them have got a satisfying element of heaviness in company with all the melodic hooks, and some are just flat-out heavy as fuck. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »