Carcass - Torn Arteries (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 17 Sep 2021
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Carcass have been away a long time. I bought their debut from Groové Records when it came out a truly unfathomable 33 years ago, yet this is only their seventh. It arrived late last year when I was slammed with events, eight years after its immediate predecessor, Surgical Steel, and a quarter of a century on from the album before that, Swansong. No wonder their sound continues to evolve in these massive leaps between releases. They invented goregrind out of new cloth, helped to invent melodic death metal and helped pioneer what's become known as death 'n' roll. So what are they going to sound like on Torn Arteries?

I wondered that out loud when I reviewed Despicable, their highly varied EP from late 2020, with a view to figuring out how well a guide it would serve to this album. Only one of its songs reappears here, which is telling, and that's Under the Scalpel Blade, also released separately as a single. It's a heavy song, but not often a fast one. Daniel Wilding sets a slow groove on the drums, while Jeff Walker growls up a storm on vocals and Bill Steer plays along in Cathedral-esque fashion, a sort of energetic doom. It's certainly melodic death metal but it's also often clearly hard rock, which puts us right under that death 'n' roll label.

Now, death 'n' roll is one of those labels that isn't really a genre. Nobody seems to decide to form a death 'n' roll band so they can play death 'n' roll, even fewer than create djent bands so they can play djent. That's a technique incorporated into a wider sound. This is a direction, I think, taken by death metal bands who still like playing their particular brand of death metal but also wanting to bring more of a classic rock sound into that. I haven't seen anyone moving from hard rock to death as it's always the other way, but that direction is really at the core of this, I think.

Oddly, if this album is going to be remembered for pioneering anything, it's going to be the use of handclaps on the song In God We Trust, which are not remotely dominant and actually sound good but are completely unexpected on a Carcass album. Like many of the songs here, it starts out with a doomy intro, heavy but not fast, then picks up a gallop that's obviously metal but not something we'd call extreme until Walker's voice joins the fray. That's a death growl but an intelligible one, a deliverer of lyrics as much as a vocal instrument. Then, halfway, Steer solos in classic rock style, as those handclaps arrive to show their approval. I didn't join in, but I was there in spirit. Only a good deal later did I realise that they were hiding in plain sight during the intro to Dance of Ixtab too.

Naysayers crawled out of the woodwork after that, but there's no Reinheitsgebot to define what a death metal band can or can't include in their music and that sort of purity law is better left in the world of beer. More open minded listeners won't care. This is a good album and, like other Carcass albums, it's going to continually find itself reevaluated in light of what came next. I remember the general reaction to Reek of Putrefaction and to Heartwork, two now legendary albums that were unlike anything around them at the time, novelty that scares a lot of people.

So Carcass think the pacy death metal of Torn Arteries can coexist on an album with the handclaps of In God We Trust? I have no intention of arguing with them about that. What surprised me most here, especially after Despicable, was how consistent this seems. This isn't a band being torn in an array of directions by musicians who want to do different things. This is a band with common goals that happen to include the heavy riffing and galloping drums of Torn Arteries, the psychedelic '70s guitarwork in Dance of Ixtab, the thrashy intensity of Eleanor Rigor Mortis's bookends, a firm feel of lively doom underpinning Under the Scalpel Blade, the hard rock in the veins of The Devil Rides Out and so on.

I liked this on a first listen, but it felt a little awkward too. The more I listen, the better it gets and the more consistent it feels. These ingredients do go together, even if they initially seem jarring. I developed a taste for this recipe and wonder how well it'll travel. Carcass aren't inventing genres this time out, but they may be rejuvenating one and bringing it to a wider audience. How that will play out is back in the hands of time and we can only hazard a guess. For now, I'm thinking of Torn Arteries as a solid but far from groundbreaking death 'n' roll album. Let's see what I'll think of it a decade from now. I have a feeling I'll still be listening to it. I'm already wondering if I should up my 7/10 to an 8/10.

Entombed A.D. - Bowels of Earth (2019)

Country: Sweden
Style: Death 'n' Roll
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2019
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While I drifted away from the rock scene in the early nineties, I did notice Entombed, whose 1990 Left Hand Path album was a pivotal death metal release and who demonstrated a will to evolve musically on their third studio album, Wolverine Blues, in 1993. Of the current Entombed A.D. line-up, only vocalist Lars-Göran Petrov was with Entombed at that point, but this band formed out of that one, after they split up in 2014. Founder member Alex Hellid had the rights to the name, so everyone else formed Entombed A.D. to continue their work in the death 'n' roll style.

I don't believe I've reviewed a death 'n' roll album yet at Apocalypse Later and I do know that Entombed A.D. don't particularly care for the genre name. I get that because they're just playing death metal in a different way, like their home town scene in Stockholm had a different sound to Gothenburg, over on the other side of Sweden.

To me, this just feels more rooted in hardcore punk than other Swedish death metal, even though it all was. It's more obvious in the sound, which amps up the bass and aims more for bounce than riffs, not only through the very punk drum sound. It makes sense for the cover on the limited edition to be of an unusual Motörhead song, because they were always as punk as they were metal too.

This is the third album for Entombed A.D., the fourth if you count the final Entombed album, Serpent Saints: The Ten Amendments, on which three quarters of this band performed, and I haven't heard the others, but it took a while for me to get on board with it. It sounded good from the very beginning but it didn't sound memorable until the title track kicked off like a piano with a lifelong dream to really be a music box, something it does at other points throughout the song.

Regardless of whether Petrov's guttural but intelligible vocal delivery has you grinning or not, Bowels of Earth chugs along on wonderfully. The guitar interplay is excellent, as is the solo, and the drums feel a lot more alive. The dynamics when the loud metal and quiet piano alternate are a lot of fun. There's a lot in this song and it's all good. Going back for a fresh listen, Hell is My Home has some strong sections too, but this album really begins for me with the title track.

It doesn't hurt that the next song is even more fun. It's Bourbon Nightmare and it kicks off with a mariachi intro. This is where Petrov's vocals work best, because they're enthusiastic but relatively monotone and this song is full of punk urgency. It's like a fifties rock 'n' roll number performed by a band of highly dextrous cavemen with nothing on their mind except rocking out with every instrument downtuned, including vocals. It's the opposite of subtle and that's absolutely fine.

From then on, this felt good to me, kind of like DOA as a death metal band. Listening to Petrov with punk in mind rather than metal, suddenly his vocals make sense. Perhaps that's why these songs work at three minutes and change but don't work as well at a longer length. To Eternal Night isn't bad, for instance, but it's almost six minutes long and that's too long for a style like this. It doesn't allow for a lot of imagination.

Entombed A.D. are a metal band, so they're more than happy to go with guitar solos, but their effect is punk and so they can only get away with so many of them before they turn back into a death metal band. For now, I'm happy a pair of Entombeds are stalking around Stockholm, but I wonder if either of them is going to grow much from here.