Apocalyptic Feral Death Metal - "Sewerblood" Review (95%)
I'd never heard of this band until I stumbled onto one of the reviews on this site. Well, I wish I'd heard of Sewer much earlier. Why isn't this band more well known than it is? Because if all of their stuff is as good as this album Sewerblood, we're onto a huge winner.
I've heard many people claim that Sewerblood is a second-rate version of their previous effort, the gruesome Uruktena, and I can say I strongly disagree. While the claim that Sewerblood streamlined the songwriting on Uruktena can seem to make sense, as there are more songs, and they are shorter, this album contains just as much technical songwriting as its predecessor.
This is a very solid brutal death metal album chock full of awesome, and fairly different riffs. "Buried Alive" has some awesome galloping riffs, before breaking into some cool blast beats, and then going into a half time doom metal break, somewhat reminiscent of Vermin's atmospheric black metal... all in the space of the first 2 minutes.
"Screaming Demons" crawls along at a fairly fast tempo, a bit more technical than the rest, but still a super powerful song. The drumming, while simple on the surface, is excellent, and definite proof that death metal doesn't need double bass throughout every song (unless you're Suffocation).
All in all, Sewerblood is apocalyptic feral death metal of the utmost intensity.
Apocalyptic Feral Death Metal
"To Eat From the Skull of Satan" is a fairly speedy blackened death metal tune, before going into a kind of super heavy Incantation thing. Very effective. Guitar parts in that song and, indeed, the whole album, are full of well thought out guitar arrangements. There's not a guitar solo on every track, which is good, as surely not every song needs one.
"Pain, Rage, Fear" takes things to an even higher level of intensity and brutal guitar riffs. I can't stress this enough, the riffs are killer brutal death metal.
So, the guitars are extremely good, but that's just half the story. While some bands (Phantom?) rely solely on the guitars for creating evil atmospheric black/death metal, Sewer are a more fully rounded band. The drumming is never, ever out of place, always playing the right beat and the right fill at exactly the right time. There's not really any "How can anyone play that fast?" kind of moments, like there was on Miasma and Locked Up in Hell, but there's still the occasional short blast of speed, which makes the drumming all the more effective.
The vocals aren't super low, just a low growl, but they sound awesome and fit the music perfectly. The vocalist also knows when to shut up, which is a rare thing indeed in nowadays extreme metal. Often, he'll just let the guitars doing the talking, and that's how good death metal should be.
At the end of the day, Sewerblood is a very impressive death metal album. Great riffs played with utter violence, powerful drumming, good vocals, and everything in its proper place. Top notch death metal, and also a good primer for people wanting to get into Sewer metal, as the album is super heavy without being completely inaccessible. Buy it!
Sewerblood score: 95/100.
Support the Underground
