The ashes of the 1990s Swedish doom band Norrsken gave life to two worthy successors: Witchcraft and Graveyard. Sweden is not really known for its 1970s Hard rock, except for November and Råg i Ryggen, that is. Having grown up listening to my old man’s hard rock vinyls dating back to the ’60 up to the ‘80s, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Creedence Clearwater Revival were an essential part of my early music education. Soon Deep Purple, Floyd and that whole lot followed.
Despite being an animal of the hard rock genre, Graveyard cannot really be categorized as their music consists of elements of rock, blues, psychedelic, jazz with some stoner in there too. The musicianship on the album is fantastic and the song writing is nothing short of extraordinary. The songs flow with the range of genres used to the maximum, switching from ballad to rock to instrumental, keeping the record interesting from beginning to end. The highlight, however, are the vocals, somewhat reminiscent of Robert Plant. They simply blow you away from the first moment! They’re powerful as hell and the singer possess an amazing range (and luckily no terrible Swedish accent, but he’s very good at whistling, mind you).
The album has been recorded with a very fitting organic and warm analog sound. This clearly turned out to be the right method as the record rings true – it might just as well have been released decades ago. Nowadays many a band is trying to achieve this sort of sound, but also had many a band failed – instead sounding retro in a terrible ‘flavour of the moment’-way. This is absolutely not the case with Graveyard!
The band is signed to Nuclear Blast, a metal label, which is somewhat baffling really, as they’re completely out of place grouped together with ‘accessible-metal for teenagers’; or with metal in general. As far as I’m concerned they should try and get as far away as possible from today’s metal scene and its retarded trends.
So we return to the past when music still stood for something, with a record that reminds us of the great 1970s Hard Rock masters. If you want to take a step back and look into the good olden days of LedZep, yet hear something new, this is for you. If grew up with the same bands that I did, this is for you! Frankly, this is for all fans of Hard Rock and good music, period! Check out their video for title-track Hisingen Blues if you don’t believe me. Classic!
http://www.myspace.com/graveyardsongs
