Swedish Death Metal has stayed popular ever since the early days for a number of reasons. Mostly it is because it allows for the music to be catchy, “brutal” and flexible (although few bands exercise this power afforded by the fact that in theory this is death metal). The death metal fan will readily associate A Trail of Death with names such as Dismember, Carnage, Nihilist or Entombed and the release lives up to these expectations from the production tone up to the general approach.
A hint of pop-influenced modernity alla Entombed is revealed here in the preference for obvious verse-chorus-bridge structures without venturing even as far as Dismember did in Like an Ever Flowing Stream and appearing like an Entombed going on Arch Enemy in the way the riffs are used: they have the affectations of death metal but underlying them can be seen the Iron Maiden – like NWOBHM chord-by-chord advance.
By this token, a more precise comparison would come of pairing this band with later Dismember and their obsession with riff-oriented music rather than a progress/development-oriented one. The Entombed edge (or should we say lack of edge) in composition is in its conventionality pretending to be extreme (Back in the day, people thought Entombed was extreme or visionary in some way — apparently some of those who understand death metal only superficially still do so even today). In the process of creating this music and never venturing outside or around of what their inspirations did at any level, Overtorture sound like one more of the herd. Nothing more, nothing less.
Tags: 2015, A Trail of Death, Arch Enemy, death metal, Dismember, entombed, Left Hand Path, Overtorture, Swedeath
Is there a post 2000 Swedish death metal album actually better than The God That Never Was?
Have any writer on this site listened to Withered Earth’s Forgotten Sunrise? It hasn’t been mentioned anywhere here (it’s rather unknown) yet I’ve always thought it was a great representative of the motivic development and narrative aspect of metal that DMU defends. It’s a strange case of a very good and very unpopular album. I haven’t listened to it properly for some months now so I hope I’m not saying nonsense, but I’d be curious to know what do you guys think of it. (In case you don’t know/have this album: I have the MP3s because it’s not even available anymore online to stream or download…)
Yeah, I like that album too and it should be better known but will never be so. From what I remember of it, it does have a narrative aspect, but is rather abstract and in the end, would prove a more difficult listen at its core for most people, I’d imagine, than something like Obscura, which has been bantered about quite a lot of late.