Artist: Carnal Savagery
Country: Sweden
Label: Moribund Records
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2024
Album #2 for Carnal Savage this year. A trick they have pulled before, as although 2023 passed without any new recordings, the band had also released their first two albums earlier in 2022. It seems a bit like the duo behind Carnal Savagery have some kind of eruption of inspiration every so often, and then instantly write so many songs that they can fill a couple of albums and then lay back to rest.
But with all due respect, you also don’t have to be a musical genius to come up with the kind of Death Metal that Carnal Savagery deals with. Like the five albums before it, ‘Graveworms, Cadavers, Coffins And Bones’ sounds pretty straightforward, without too much frills and fuss. In fact, this is pretty much Swedish Death Metal by numbers: some groove, ditto dynamics, some melody and rough vocals
But where many bands in this same musical corner do lean a bit in the boring direction, Carnal Savagery manages to keep the music exciting enough with that much-needed dynamic to effortlessly sit out the whole ride, in this case 35 minutes. In recent years, this particular scene has been a bit knocked down with fairly soulless Death Metal from the likes of characters like Rogga Johansson (yes, there he is again, my favourite victim of comparison), but even though Carnal Savagery draws inspiration from the same angle, this is certainly much more digestible. The tempos go from a solid HM-2 groove to nice up-tempo pieces, and the non-cheesy melodies also fit in well. The icing on the cake is Mattias Lilja’s raw vocals that complete the comparison with Dismember.
Although its predecessor, ‘Into The Abysmal Void’ from earlier this year, was certainly not a bad album either, the sound was a bit too compressed/plastic which made it not one of my favorite Carnal Savagery albums. That has fortunately been rectified on this latest work, ‘Graveworms, Cadavers, Coffins And Bones’ sounds old-fashionedly organic again, which certainly benefits the thick HM-2 groove. It is also definitely noticeable that the band has taken a more melodic direction. Just listen to the closing ‘Decapitated,’ this is where the groove, up-tempo beat and melody come together best. So, again, the comparison with Dismember holds true.
Obviously the level of Dismember is not reached, for this it all sounds just a bit too simple and the harmonies are missing, but that is not a problem at all. ‘Graveworms, Cadavers, Coffins And Bones’ is just a very solid album that will please the fan of (Swedish) Death Metal without a doubt.
