Artist: Grave
Label: Century Media
Released: 2006
Rating: 4/5
Grave’s seventh studio album is in all likelihood the most brutal thing the band has put out compared to everything in their studio catalog so far. If you look at where bands like this are heading these days with their record releases, songs often turn out more and more drawn out while brutality loses its meaning. And brutality is exactly that shocking thing you can’t musically imagine, and can’t even wrap your head around, until a death metal experience fires that kind of rocket straight into your skull. It’s what has always made this genre so damn appealing.
“As Rapture Comes” is a full-on assault of “old school swedish death metal”, hellishly galloping “blast beats”, soaked in the erupting intensity of breakneck riffing from start to finish. The album also shows a much higher level of maturity and technical polish than its older brothers released under the Grave banner, which is a very welcome and gratifying quality that will reward every fan of the primal virtues of death metal. Soundwise, “As Rapture Comes” comes closer than any other Grave album to their debut “Into The Grave”, which to this day ranks among the band’s most hard-fought glories. Of course, add the maturity and excellence of a modern, clean production that keeps the necessary rawness alive, and the new album is a proper upgrade. An upgrade in the sense that Grave stay true to their style and their musical vision across two decades, all the way to today, so taking cues from the debut makes perfect sense.
“As Raputre Comes” is an album that fills your ears with deadly serious “horror” across its entire runtime, while offering the unmistakable identity of a band that managed to play itself a royal flush in its career, or in other words, a musical niche all of its own within the Stockholm old school death metal scene. Their fellow countrymen weren’t capable of keeping that message alive, and I’m not just talking about the “sold souls” In Flames, who have long been selling what you could plainly call “ordinary crap”, or the long-burnt-out and played-out At The Gates, or say Entombed, who for a long time now have been serving up a sound in the studio that mostly reminds you of Motorhead. Sure, Grave aren’t offering anything new, but “As Rapture Comes” shows that the Swedish old school of “death metal” is still bloody well kicking around. Slowly rolling, creepy, crawling rhythms mercilessly beat and whip every square centimeter of skin of anyone who tries them. The guitar riffs are like the tolling of the bell of judgment day, unstoppable and boiling over, creeping across this stellar drum work. Supersonic detonations of double bass pedal machine guns run through the album lengthwise and crosswise. The vocal croak spits blood, relentlessly and for real! The growls convincingly announce that we’re unstoppably nearing total cathartic doom.
The finest examples of the classic Grave sound awaken once again in all their imposing glory and tempt you through the songs Epic Obliteration, By Demons Breed, then in the excellent two-minute riff at the end of the title track As Rapture Comes, which also closes out the record, and in Through Eternity. On the new album Grave also served up a witty cover of the radio anthem Them Bones (originally by Alice In Chains), which they literally destroy and smash into dust and ashes with double bass pedal and venomous grinding over a snarling guitar riff set up before the chorus of the track.
As mentioned, Grave aren’t inventing anything new, but with this album they gratefully remind us that real old-school “speak and spell” primal Swedish death metal is still alive. Music of the graveyards will wake every rotting dweller of the tombs and send them leaping to their feet into a whirlwind of wild gravestone rituals, in which their old worn-out, gnawed-on bones will rattle properly once again. And there’s no way you won’t join that ritual too, through these 40 minutes of pure, destructive death metal eruption. The devil has just received another passionate, filthy dedication to forbidden temptations and is already merrily chewing flies in his stinking underground lair!
Lineup
Ola Lindgren – vocals, guitar
Jonas Torndal – guitar
Frederik Isaksson – bass
Pelle Ekegren – drums
Production
Peter Tagtgren
Tracklist
1. Day of Reckoning
2. Burn
3. Through Eternity
4. By Demons Bred
5. Living the Dead Behind
6. Unholy Terror
7. Battle of Eden
8. Epic Obliteration
9. Them Bones
10. As Rapture Comes
Album length: 41:13
