Expulsion - Certain Corpses Never Decay (2014)

Is any Swedish stone yet unturned at this point? Must we till the soil, and find the rocks buried underneath? Apparently so, and thus Vic Records has excavated the 1989 demos of Expulsion, a band with relations to the whole Tiamat/Treblinka family which went on to record a handful of forgotten, ill-received records through the 90s, but once performed with a very authentic death/thrash roots aesthetic that seems fully in line with what a lot of underground purists seek out these days. I'm at a point now where my own enthusiasm waxes and wanes for these sorts of releases; on the one hand I get a chance to add some long forsaken gem into my collection, on the other you can kind of see why some of this stuff never broke bigger in the first place...

As for Expulsion, their Cerebral Cessation and Veiled in the Mists of Mystery demos seem to fall in between these poles. This is pretty crude material with riffs that should have been considered average even in their day, and yet it has that general authenticity and innocence which existed prior to the redundancy of their sound. Harshly barking guitars woven into threads of Napalm Death grinding bursts, thrashing mid-paced chops and even a few sluggish grooves redolent of something else British like Bolt Thrower, complete with the mulish little guitar fills at the end of phrases. There's also a heavy doom aesthetic here revolving around some of the slower, drudging riff progressions which remind me of Candlemass if they'd had a primitive black/death metal frontman rather than the operatics of Messiah Marcolin. Thanks to the bloody, hacking vocals here, there is an internal consistency through the demos, but otherwise there might be a little of the disparity we heard on the earlier Tiamat recordings, where the band couldn't quite lay its roots in any one niche, and so explored them all through a dynamic, occult atmospheric blend of seminal extreme metal.

Alas, the songs just aren't nearly as poignant or timeless as those on Sumerian Cry or The Astral Sleep, and so I'm just sort of left appreciating the material for its stark simplicity and hopefulness of transforming into something more. There are a few points at which the songs sound like barely brushed up rehearsals, and others where they delve into a solid, morbid chord progression somewhere around Autopsy or Treblinka in architecture, with crud coating the rhythm guitars and ugliness aplenty, which even the sparse acoustic guitars cannot effectively pierce. Cool for collectors and completionists that had yet to add these to their catalogs, since to my knowledge they haven't been released before (with the possible exception of online rips), but I can see why this probably didn't generate much interest in the first place. I'd also say, that if you're not opposed to a richer production and songwriting more similar to fellow Swedes Cemetary or Lake of Tears, their 1994 full-length Overflow might not be a bad place to start instead. I was never really into that, nor am I feeling these more primal origins, so I can't highly recommend any of it; their material with the other eventual bands was more my style.

Verdict: Indifference [5.75/10]

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Expulsion/191657390849316

Expulsion - Wasteworld (2009)

Because hearing one great new Dutch death metal record in a week was not enough, I present to you the full-length from Expulsion. This is a fast, fast band, who hitch explosive thrash metal bumpers onto their grisly roller coaster of writhing, spastic death. Their style feels a lot like the energetic Swedish melodic death of a band like At the Gates, Terror 2000 or the more frenetic tracks of The Haunted, injected with a hyperactive desperation, as if the world is about to end over and over again, and Expulsion has a lot that they want to get off their chests first!

You are first given a swelling, brief guitar instrumental before the band just nails you in the face with a powerful trio of "Land of Empty Graves", "Neoconomicon" (hahaha), and "End of Days", the latter of which is a thrashing eruption that could probably power most vehicles if its energy could be contained. I have rarely heard such spastic lambasting outside of the faster tracks from Darkane, Dimension Zero or Terror 2000, and yet even here the band has some great riffs like the dizzying bends after the 1:00 mark. I'd advise you take a breather after these, because "Martyr" is only mildly more forgiving, and "Messianic Shadows" slows down to a battlefield crawl before its great initial leads and savage thrust. There are plenty of quality offerings to compose the remainder of this debut, including the jumpy "Promise Never Made" and the storming onslaught of "Spirit Emission".

If there is any weakness to Expulsion, well, perhaps they just move too quickly too often. They do this with riffing fortitude, mind you, but a little bit of an additional dynamic shift here or there would not harm their writing. Like a testosterone rush, these songs can leave you in the dust feeling tired and less appreciative after the fact. Not to say that the album flies past for 100% of the playlength, but just enough that you can almost get bored by the speed. I also did not find myself completely falling for A.B.'s vocal bark, I'd almost expect something wilder to match up with the rapid riffing, but it's not necessarily bad. Wasteworld is a debut that should turn heads just sharply enough that the necks connected to those heads are strained or snapped, and the general quality of the freakish, terminal riffs is enough to recommend it by.

Highlights: End of Days, Messianic Shadows, Primise Never Made, Spirit Emission

Verdict: Win [8/10]

http://www.expulsion.nl/