What do you get when you form a supergroup from members of Entombed, Unleashed, and Necrophobic, all of whom released excellent formative death metal at the beginnings of their careers? Not much, apparently. Firespawn (formerly Fireborn) plays generic modern Swedeath with slight hints of melody and not much else of interest. If you ever needed a reminder that a promising lineup does not automatically translate into a product that is even promising at best, Shadow Realms is there for you – more accurately, you will be able to purchase it on November 13th from Century Media if its banality fails to undermine your interest. In the mean time, you can listen to one of its upcoming tracks (“Ruination”) for a textbook example of how to put together generic deathpop. Particularly notable are the rudimentary vocal rhythms and the exceedingly basic song structure.
Future coverage is possible, but very likely to be sadistic in nature.
Tags: 2015, death metal, firespawn, lame metal, mainstream metal, shadow realms, Swedeath
None of these guys were actually the ones who wrote the good material or were even in those long running bands when they were good except for LG Petrov. This band is just a bunch of journeyman musicians playing Swedeathy VCV pop music.
Fucking exactly! Matte Modin didn’t join Dark Funeral until their third album, and he’s arguably more famous for being in Defleshed. Alex Friberg (Berg? /pol/ is always right) has only played on the last two Necrophobic albums. It’s not like they fucking dug up Blackmoon or something. Victor Brandt is L-G’s hired gun bassist for Entombed A.D. Fredrik Folkare has only been with Unleashed since Warrior, which was released two years after people stopped caring about new material from that band.
The only person involved with any classic death metal at all is L-G Petrov, and he’s just the vocalist! Why does this matter? Because this band has been marketed as an old school death metal supergroup Necrophobic/Unleashed/Dark Funeral/Entombed collaboration since their Fireborn days.
The music itself waffles between generic Cannibal Corpse/Vomitory Baby’s First Death Metal™ and boring latter day Amon Amarth/Abducted-era Hypocrisy melodic stomp’n’chug crowd pleasers depending on which song you listen to.
When they first put out material as Fireborn, I felt pretty alone in bashing them. Everyone else seemed to be buying into the old school hype, but as time has worn on, it seems like more and more people are coming to see this band for the disingenuous marketing ploy it is. Unfortunately, it seems like this development has coincided with their turn towards a more modern death metal aesthetic, which indicates to me that a lot of “metalheads” would still be okay with this band if they had slathered some HM-2 distortion over it and called it the second coming of Left Hand Path.
I agree with your assessment of the music. The instrumental work is lackluster and the vocals are terrible. The cover art looks nice, but that’s the only good thing I’m able to say about them.
This metal has been rated as Safe by SafeMetal™ Advisory.