Originally written by Erik Thomas.
Synopsis:
Listen up douchebags, instead of arguing in endless lashes in one of my deathcore reviews about what’s heavy, what’s metal, what’s trendy, and telling me my taste in music sucks, why don’t you shut the fuck up, quit whining and feeling self important and listen to this CD and appreciate some truly killer old school death metal and have beer?
Review:
So this year, Evocation has delivered the pre-eminent Entombed tribute, and the always reliable Fleshcrawl have again pretty much delivered a Dismember cover album. So where’s the love for Unleashed and Grave, the other Stockholm luminaries who helped shape a genre?
Here, fuckers: Enter Sweden’s Nominon.
This long running act has been toiling away in the shadow of their peers since 1999, but with the leveling off of both Dismember and Entombed, here they come with only their third album of classic, rumbling Stockholm death metal, that forsakes the subtle moods and atmospheres of Entombed and the razor sharp harmonies of Dismember in favour of some dirtier, chunky, Sunlight Studio drenched groove and blast that imbues Unleashed’s early work as well as Grave’s underrated You’ll Never See…
From the opening buzz and gallop of “Release in Death”, through the classic pace of “Arcanum” (if you don’t hear Unleashed at 2:30, just give up on metal already), the ominous rumble of “Black Chapel”, slightly blackened furor (think Necrophobic) of “Ebola”, to the bottom end Grave-like groove of “Tabula Rasa” and crawl of “Bane Appetite” (which does serve up some Entombed like scrawling), all the solid tracks are thickly rendered with an awesomely mid range buzz and hum of their peers’ classic work and some hellish black/death metal snarls from Daniel Garptoft.
The US version of this release has a live version of “Condemned to Die” from the band’s previous Recremation album, but it’s as you’d expect from a live death metal recording that relies on mid range–a muddy, sloppy mess. Still, that’s a small black mark on what’s otherwise 10 tracks of superb Stockholm death metal done perfectly and with just the right balance of homage and personal touch that, along with Evocation’s Tales From the Tomb, make it a must have for fans of any of the Swedish classics.
