When your promotional materials boldy claim that your album is the ‘Best Swedish death metal of 2023”, you’ve got some balls on you, that’s for sure. But you certainly got my attention.
The thing is…… the claim might be right.
Even with some hefty competition from the likes of Wretched Fate, Iron Flesh, Angerot, Coffin Mulch, The Grifted, and Vometheist in 2023’s first half, these brazen newcomers (with members from Vampire, Portrait, Nominon and Dr. Living Dead!) have absolutely knocked it out of the park with their debut, one of the more impressive in the genre I’ve heard in a few years.
Unabashedly culling from Dismember’s more urgent, melodic, solo-filled take on the genre, Imperishable is basically an album of homage to tracks like “Dismembered” (listen to opener “Venomous”), “Bleed For Me” (listen to The Perennial Desire”), “Skin Her Alive” (listen to “Teeth of the Hydra”, or “Come, Sweet Death”), or “Questionable Ethics” (listen to “The Phantasm”).
There’s very little in the way of massive, speaker-shaking grooves, Entrails this is not, (but when they do such as the ends of “Infernal Lust” or “The Perennial Desire”, it’s solid) or classic canters to imbue Grave or Entombed, just a pretty relentless focus on slicing galloping riffs and melodies, filled with lots and lots of solos.
The production has a clean, sharp HM2 tone, rather than an overbearing bottom end, but there’s a very nice buzz throughout, and the vocals of Henric Skoog have that mid-range Matti Karki rasp/bark, rather than a deeper bellow. And at times they can be flat-out savage as heard on “Vertiginous” or “Deathspawn” , but still deliver sleek harmonies and leads at will.
Other than the short “Prelude”, the album’s only real respite can be heard towards the end of the album with the doomy start of “Fangs” and its more mid-paced moments or “Come, Sweet Death’s” occasional slowdowns.
A real scorcher of a debut album, and certainly the bold claims of the promotional materials have some merit, but as we hit the halfway point of 2023……it’s a real possibility.
