Tag: Sweden

  • Count Raven: Mammons War

    Mammons War is kick-ass Doom metal offering, combining elements from several genres; Dan “Fodde” Fondelius has done a fine job creating that. A very respectable and a pretty cool album to check out.

  • Marduk: Wormwood

    In the midst of harvest time, Swedish metal veterans Marduk have offered up Wormwood. It’s a grotesque feast of sonic gore, and as such brings to mind the best in bombastic and blasphemous splatter movies. Like a lot of its cinematic counterparts, however, the album is a mixed-bag.

  • Mean Streak: Metal Slave

    The pace is very steady with solid lead guitars going back and forth, Metal Slave is about exactly what you always wanted in a NWOBHM style album. These guys give a helluva good performance, showing a great influence of Judas Priest, Battleaxe, Saxon and early Scorpions. It is a pleasure to listen to a debut…

  • The 11th Hour: Burden Of Grief

    Grief doesn’t quite capture the emotional atmosphere soaking this debut from Dutch/Swedish duo The 11th Hour. Burden, yes – the album is tormented, weighed down. But grief sounds too frail to describe songs laden with so much heavy gloom.

  • Necrophobic: Satanic Blasphemies

    Satanic Blasphemies is a collection of tracks from nineties demos Slow Asphyxiation, Unholy Prophecies and the 7” EP The Call. Nine tracks of classic death metal that evoke much ‘grandfather’-esque influence on bands making their mark today.

  • Hysterica: Metalwar

    Metalwar is somewhat similar to an 80’s band called Leather Angel; this has the same sort of feel as their 1982 album We Came to Kill. I actually expected Hysterica to be another dreadful, typical, cheesy female band and all that. Luckily I was wrong, well at least somewhat wrong.

  • Culted: Below The Thunders of The Upper Deep

    Culted’s MySpace biography makes much of the fact that the band’s impressive first full-length album is a “truly collaborative effort across international lines.” One can only hope for more musical cooperation in the future from the jointly Canadian/Swedish band.

  • Bone Gnawer: Feast Of Flesh

    For me, anything that Massacre/Denial Fiend vocalist Kam Lee is involved with gets me excited and I am very happy to report that this new Bone Gnawer project is no exception. In fact, it is possibly some of his finest work.

  • Vanmakt: Ad Luciferi Regnum

    With the rise of the blackened death metal sound, this record is a pleasant surprise. These Swedes make it evident that their creativity as a whole was expressed with much ease.

  • Ophthalamia: A Journey in Darkness (reissue)

    A Journey in Darkness is a truly singular work within the realm of Swedish metal. There really is nothing else like it. Recorded in 1993 at Unisound Studios, the pseudonymically-inclined all-star lineup consisted of It (aka. Tony Särkkä of Abruptum and Vondur), Mourning (aka. Robert Ivarsson of Pan Thy Monium), Winter (aka. Benny Larsson of…