Sweden’s Blood Mortized are back with a new album, and as you might guess from that album cover, they’re not fucking around. However, as you might not guess from that cover art, there’s a lot more going on in The Demon, The Angel, The Disease than maniacal serial killers and a big unholy whiff of cemetery rot.

The resurgence of Swedish-style death metal in the blood line of Grave-Dismember-Entombed proves the adage that, in time, everything old is new again. But frequently the new releases in this vein just sound old, old and tired, even to people like me who are addicted to this style. It’s not enough to simply capture the tone and the atmosphere. Make no mistake, you do need that, but you need more to make a great album that will put smiles on the faces of the hellish faithful and cause them to slobber in ghoulish glee. I’ll tell you how Blood Mortized have pulled off that trick.

We begin with the essentials. The production job on the album (by Linus Nirbrant of Sweden’s This Ending) makes it sound absolutely massive, not too murky or raw but still corroded and corrosive. When heard at the proper volume (i.e., the level that will leave you with tinnitus for days), the music is overwhelmingly powerful. The drums (performed by Norway’s Brynjar Helgetum) go off like cannon volleys, like nearby thunder, like heavy caliber machine guns on full auto. And listening to the guitars and bass, tuned low and deep and shrouded in distortion, is like being trapped inside a giant chainsaw or a titanic tunnel boring machine. Like these things: Continue reading »

On their second album, The Key To A Black Heart, Blood Mortized take a monstrous step forward, turning out by far their finest work yet and creating one of the best old-school death metal albums of 2012. By old-school, I’m referring to that distinctive old Swedish school, where rotting flesh sloughs off the faces of the taloned teachers and the curriculum concentrates on raising the dead and feeding them from the flesh of the living — but with a heavy course load in the lessons of bands like …For Victory-era Bolt Thrower and early Celtic Frost.

To succeed in creating this kind of music with the incontestable ring of authenticity requires faithfulness to the core elements of the sound, and Blood Mortized are definitely true believers. They’re also highly skilled practitioners in the dark arts of breathing ghoulish life into the festering meat of the departed. They know what body parts this music is made of, and they know how to reanimate the patchwork corpses and give them grisly new life.

But that alone wouldn’t earn them an A. What elevates this album above many other new offerings in the genre is superior songwriting and genuine flair in the performances at all positions.

A listing of the common denominators of the songs — those core elements of the sound — must begin with a truly massive “wall of guitar” approach to the riffing. Brutally down-tuned and distorted, the guitars grind and spin like giant buzzsaws pulverizing their way through dense concrete, or they chug like some titanic black train straight out of hell, belching dense, oily smoke. The bass tone is equally tank-heavy, more felt than heard as it sets up a vibration deep in your guts. Continue reading »