Labels: Suicide Records
Review by: Alex Hannan
DÖDSVARG are a one man band, active for three or four years, and the tight, airless sonic sheen of their second album suggests a perfectionist at the helm. Jon Ekström is joined by a series of guest vocalists on this record, none of whose other bands I know, but who seem active in the Swedish metal scene – Jens Ekelin of RENTOKILLER, Primathor of SVEDERNA, and Samuel Skoog of THIS IS NOT A GAME OF WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU (!) handle the mic on several tracks between them, and David Flood of AGE OF WOE guest drums on a couple of tracks.
Glädjedödaren – “Joy killer” in English – opens with a meditative and melancholy synthy track that evokes the modes of folk song, using electronic textures somewhere between keyboard and stringed instrument. It’s a short but beguiling piece that plunges into guttural yelling and chromatic riffing with the opening salvos of “Juottovasikkaa”, whose guitars cultivate an uneasy atmosphere, chugging restlessly round narrow intervals or repeating obsessively while droning noise / feedback parts churn in the background. Against a precise, almost quantized rhythmic background, the rhythmic transitions between parts are supple, drawing on an industrial, mechanical crunch. Suddenly we segue without a break into a different vocalist for the second song, this brief 35-second number Primathor’s only appearance, and then straight into “Allt är åt helvete och det blir bara värre” – “Everything is in hell and it just gets worse” – which starts to introduce a bit of a groove. Imagine a straight up metal version of REFUSED around the time of “Shape of punk to come.” The energy of this half of the album peaks with “Outhärdligt”, which drops into a sort of metal/industrial CHILLI PEPPERS funk. It’s a step too far into KERRANG fodder for me, evoking white boys with dreads hollering into a fish-eye lens about how diStUrBeD they are. It does demonstrate that Jon is more than capable of handling vocals, though.
The instrumental “I Kolgruvorna” relaxes things a bit, keeping a fast clip but using a lighter palette, subtly menacing with cleaner guitars. “Satan” features intertwining guitar leads before descending into a crunchy asymmetrical chug-fest. “Tyrann” and “Ångest och vrede” are the most interesting songs of the bunch. The former begins with a rollicking riff in 3s unspooling into chiming guitars before Jon starts yelling into the void, backed by teeth-gritted, tremolo-picked melodies. The latter harnesses more REFUSED-like syncopated riffing and complex little writhing guitar parts, more soaring tremolo rising from the gnarly riffs below.
Parts of “Glädjedödaren” remind me of nu-metal, and it’s interesting to hear someone braiding musical influences from that genre – which I associate with self-indulgent angst, bro-downs and the widespread grabbing of the brass ring of the music industry – with ideas from black metal, hardcore and so forth. The tracks are relatively short and leave little space for self-indulgence, and the vocals are uniformly raging. However, I could really do without “Skall slås i spillror”, which it took a few tries to get through without reflexively stabbing the “stop” button. More keyboard-based melancholy and martial drums alternate with a slow, determined trudge – then there’s a longish pause, some bleeps and static, Swedish rapper Hector Sjölund Peinado Peña heaves into view over more industrial drums and it all gets a bit LIMP BIZKIT for me.
So I’d lose a couple of numbers in my personal mix of the album, but there is a lot to like here, it’s a craftsmanlike, dark and evocative listen.