If you look carefully at the bottom left of the cover of the debut album from Sweden’s In Pain, you can see a small building that’s Sunlight Studio’s and in the door, non other than Tomas Skogsberg, the master of the mid range, HM 2 death metal sound. Fitting considering, as with the band’s EP from last year, Summoning the Dead, In Pain has once again returned to the source to produced their long awaited first album.
Like country mates Entrails and Evocation, In Pain were knocking around in the genre’s formative years, but never really got around to releasing anything significant other than some underground demos or splits. So now all these years later, the band is finally releasing material, and much like the above mentioned bands, when they finally got around to recording and releasing albums, it’s a truly awesome, authentic sounding Stockholm sound that’s years in the making.
Opener “Atrocity” gets things rolling, and if you hadn’t heard the prior EP, it’s immediately apparent that these guys are more in line with the more beefy Grave sound of yore as opposed to the more obvious Entombed and Dismember worship (though there are still strains of both). The song’s killer, classic, pummeling canter and more down-tuned, thicker tones and gruffer vocals clearly imbue Grave’s debut Into the Grave. Follow up song, “Shallow Grave” has another early killer groove and 2 and a half minutes in, but this one imbues a little of Dismember’s “Casket Garden”, so even when dipping away from the burlier Grave hues, it’s still rooted in a thicker more groovy, hefty sound.
“Battle” delivers a rare, more urgent wall of down-tuned Stockholm buzzing, mixed with a little Bolt Thrower warmongering (As does “The Warmachine” later, along with another killer gallop similar to the opener)) , before “B.T.K” delivers a super hefty mid paced bruiser. “It Was Meant to Die”, mixes a little speed with a little heft with good results, but man those slow, rumbling trundling riffs are where the band really shines, especially when they deliver one of those slow, one guitar riff starters that rattles your teeth (i.e. the 48 second mark of “The Shadow From the Ancient Tomb” or 50 second mark of thunderous moody closer “Rise From the Deep”).
SouthCoast has only released a hand full of albums in their young existence (Neptunian Sun, Poison Whiskey, In Pain), but In Pain is clearly their early flagship band as Entrails was for Dark Descent a decade ago. Let’s hope the band and the label can continue to grow into the same kind of power houses.
