Fleshcrawl - Bloodred Massacre
Review: Slicing waves of structure buffet the listener in this abrupt and powerfully abstracted death metal in the Swedish style. Fleshcrawl, with three albums previous under their collective belt built an encompassing structure for their often doomy and consistently melodic raw death metal, in the furthest evolution so far of their highly thematic and atmospheric thunderous death metal.
The adept sense of rhythm underlying the placement of phrase within this work gives it muscle for dramatic and often unforseen changes, which on observation from a position of realization of the fundamental patterning to each song, allowing its themes to play themselves out in a stream of riffs complementing a central melody with varying degrees of consonance to a corresponding portion of its progression. Fleetingly tucked into this music are speed metal inspired rhythm changes between loping rock beats to uptempo punk demiblasts, letting a rhythm pulse between two melodies until a fusion is forced by familiarity.
On this album, consecutive iterations of creation have reduced these elements to their bare presentation needs, allowing the essential vision of each song to expand in a wave of pulsing but architecturally defined sounds, inundating the listener with first its powerful nihilism and then its carefully harmonized melodic deconstruction. This, with the almost irrefutable bassy chant of shredded vocals, conspires to make the inherent honesty and hope of these works shine forth as structural communication in the best tradition of the Swedish death metal style.