OK, new Law Of Metal #36b: for the next 30 years anyone using Pieter Bruegel's painting 'The Triumph Of Death' will be forced to appear on the X-Factor and have all their CDs melted down for cups in a Shared Earth shop. The last good album I heard with it as a cover was The Gates Of Slumber debut 'The Awakening...' and its such a painfully obvious choice it is beginning to grate.
Or maybe I'm just a grump.
So. Here we are. Gravewurm. Second album of 2010. Two labels. No idea what's going on in their camp, especially as their other 2010 effort Blood Of The Pentagram is noted as their last ever. It is their fifth, or sixth depending on order, from this long standing band who formed in 1990 (though as is often the way, struggles meant that it took ten years to get that first full length out) and who have a dizzying list of bands they have shared a stage with showing they are not afraid to put themselves out there.
This is proto-black metal, citing Bathory, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Venom, Nemesis, Mercyful Fate and Sodom as their foundations. Not sure about the Mercyful Fate, but the rest is a fair ballpark nod; think basic production values, primitive 90s sound all tiny room, dank walls and gargled, croaked vocals. It is stick to your guns, play what you want and FOAD to anyone who wants them to be different and it is as resolutely old skool and underground as their name.
The problem here is that I found it shockingly unvaried. It opens at a midpaced stomp and ends some ten songs later with only the occasional slow down to vary the palette. The same guitar sound, only briefly broken from the distort 'n' chug by some nice discordant lead work that promises but never quite delivers you into a new landscape.
It's as though this album is incomplete demos: Two or three songs end abruptly, seemingly mid chord and everything is laid down so flat by the production (or lack of one) that it feels as though they are waiting to be finished off with another layer or texture or something. It leaves them with no real bite and precious little sense of malevolence beyond the vocals. Nothing to pull one song from the other. Yet still the recording sound keeps forcing them into the same restrictive channel and stripping it of any emotional punch. It really is all this mid paced, relentless turnover that too often sounds like the same riff re-used.
Whereas Hellhammer, for all their No-Fi birthing, sounded like a band trying to wrestle some thrashing dark, disturbed and primitive thing into some structure long enough to force a song out, Gravewurm here are made to sound as though they are trying to create motion from sodden, cemetery clay.
I'm not entirely blaming the band here: The album is rounded out by three live tracks that sound as though they were recorded on someone's mobile phone but they are better in every department. There is variation to them. There are shades of black if you like in the riffs and the live vocals are feral not a safe in a studio gargle. There's a crackle of energy here. They may not be classic but they are listenable and interesting and make the rest of the album sound even more uninspired I'm afraid.
It isn't all bad: In those brief leads there is a feel for the weird, off kilter guitar breaks of yore, strangled sounds too twisted to be melody but providing colour nevertheless. And as I said those live tracks do promise more. But they are scarce and this is the album I got. Maybe I'm dim and just don't get what they are trying to achieve here, perhaps I don't have the feel for their music but I can't help thinking on the evidence of the live tracks that this wasn't the album Gravewurm were thinking they were recording.
Sorry but I'll pass.
http://www.myspace.com/gravewurm
