Fleshcrawl - Bloodsoul
Review: If classic death metal is your thing, serve up this steak of meaty blood gratification. Violent old-style rhythm riffs of power chords and driving choruses, rumbling verses and virulent solos over structural interchanges within the songs with precision delivery make this work a death metal signature sound with room to grow. What qualifies it however is the adroit use of wide range of patterns shaped to simple rhythms in unsion communicating essential motivation through perceptive emotion, scattering throughout blasting vengeance a sparse poetry of survival.
The music aggressivelylike a darker European version of Sepultura in its rhythmic delivery with the intensity and grandeur of potent death metal. As in the last album similarity exists to Bolt Thrower in some of the tumescent grinding and melodic layering within riffs. Thundering recursion rhythms alternating with smoothly emerging chorus riffs, in the style of the Swedish death metal gods, is manifest here in songs that use basic rock beats over which the strumming rhythms of a few power chords command syncopated attention of the elements of the song. The listen experiences immersion in a rhythm as it cycles and mutates in an encircling, hypnotic paradox of its own genesis.
With most songs the rhythms follow several major types, which are the blasting intense speed passages that often sound like Terrorizer, the pattern introductory riffs and layered melodic outlining that resemble Bolt Thrower, the rolling double-bass suspension patterns not unlike an older American death metal band, the eurometal rock-beat style riff delivery like Dismember and the doomy passages as Cianide or another strident rhythm doomy grind band would use. These are by no means definitive categories but approximations of the style within which Fleshcrawl work their variations, expressing some form of rolling decay and thunderous deconstruction of earth, sky, emotion.
When working within a style after the genre has abandoned it the option of modifying existing paterns or attempting a new articulation shapes the foundation of the resulting output. Fleshcrawl have chosen the former and for that reason this release does not blow minds but suspends them in a reasonable musical experience with lush overtones of conceptualization in the lexicon of death metal. For those who appreciate the simple brutality of elemental death metal these albums are a mostly undiscovered resource. With a cover of a Demilich song entitled "Embalmed Beauty Sleep" from their demos previous to "Nespithe," which here is played as indulgently muscular and accelerated death metal.