Mr. Death - Descending Through Ashes (2011)

It's pretty easy to just write off Mr. Death as another of the tide of Entombed and Dismember clones that are literally pouring out of every fucking surface on the planet, but they've made a few choices for their band that help them stand out slightly from the usual flood of d-beat doppelgangers. The whole 'serial killers in suits' things that they use for a gimmick in their pictures and live gigs creates a sort of American Psycho meets Wolverine Blues aesthetic which is a lotta fun, and their actual songwriting tends to focus more on grittier, grooving and crushing force than a complete knockoff of Left Hand Path like so many other bands I've heard these past few years. That said, though, I wasn't blown over by their last release, the Death Suits You EP, and I'm not much more impressed with their sophomore full-length, Descending Through Ashes.

For one, while I can appreciate the sheer weight of the guitar tone, so loud and dirty that it threatens to blow out your speakers, it does not necessarily acclimate itself to exciting song writing. I mean, the sheer visceral might of a track like "Your Final Demise" is difficult to deny, they play enormous (if crude) riffs with a lot of inherent groove while the vocalist howls off in the distance doing a decent stint in the death & roll niche ala L-G Petrov. But they just don't write riffs with the same level of menace and evil as most of their influences. "Another State of Decay", "Bloodfalls", and "The Plague and the World it Made" all churn the listener's brain into butter, and they do one-up a lot of their peers in heaviness alone, but this is more a measure of the actual volume of the instruments than the strength of the songs. Also, a few of the songs definitely sound uncomfortably similar to Entombed during the Wolverine Blues era ("From the Valley of Defilement", "Descending Through Ashes" itself) with a samey, chugging gait, which would be easy to overlook if they were really good, but they're not.

At any rate, if you're a sucker for this colossal, crushing Swedish tone, than Mr. Death give you that on overdrive. If you want to zombie mosh until your fists are bruised and you suffer an embolism or arterial rupture, then you could do a lot worse than Descending Through Ashes. But part of the reason I am so fond of this niche of the death metal genre is for its grave-born, diabolical underpinnings, and these guys are more about the actual muscle of the undead rather than the chill, spectral intimidation that you'll find on the classics. That's not necessarily a weakness, mind you, but with guitars so overpowering I would really hope that I'd better remember the notes they were playing, and that's just not often enough the case here.

Verdict: Indifference [6.75/10]

http://www.mrdeath.se/

Mr. Death - Death Suits You EP (2010)

Mr. Death might seem a rather cosmopolitan spin on the classic Swedish death metal genre, what with their bloodied suit corporate zombie gimmick. Of course, this is not entirely novel within extreme metal as a whole, but I rather enjoy it when a band cultivates such a combination of class and carnage. Musically, they're even less novel, yet another in an endless cycle of bands dredging up the old school 90s dirt of Entombed, Carnage, Dismember, Grave, and their ilk to once again ravage the living, but Mr. Death seem to have one thing going for them: they know how to pace themselves, offering just the right balance of faster and mid-paced murder and groove to remind the listener exactly what he or she loved about the country's take on the genre in the first place.

Death Suits You is a stopgap between full-length albums, following on the heels of last year's Detached from Life, a foul meaning if ultimately forgettable debut that served only to register them among the crop of nostalgic gravediggers that has exploded in recent years. No risks were taken, no brains consumed in its creation, but it was competent enough. The six songs here are not a major step away from that material, but I felt like the brooding, morbid grooves that cut through "Curse of the Masses", "The Plague and the World It Made", or "On Day 51" offer a glimpse at maturation alongside a faster moving, unbridled antiquity of the guitar riffing, very similar to how Entombed or Desultory expanded their sounds to incorporate a heavier rock and blues influence, more or less gimping themselves in the process. However, Mr. Death does not suffer the same problem, because they somehow keep the guitars on the course of evil, even with something like "Strandead", which surges back and forth from pure repulsion grind to a more uplifting, d-beat riff.

That said, I didn't like all of the songs here quite the same. Opener "March to the Dark" in particular seemed like it might foster some promise, but I found myself numbing to its flustered gait. On the other hand, "Celestial Suffering" musters a doom-like intro worthy of Wolverine Blues, followed by the requisite rock pacing and a series of riffs that just seem to escalate in quality until the unexpected, transcendent melodies that charge into the eventual burnout. With more songs of this quality, Mr. Death are apt to turn a lot of heads loose from their sockets, since there is something more here than the tedium of the genre's unending saturation. Time will tell if the band follows up on these traces of potential, or if they whittle away into the shadows of overpopulation, but Death Suits You is only recommended to those who can't get enough of the style, hunting for slight variations on an apparently infinite theme.

Verdict: Indifference [6.5/10]

http://www.mrdeath.se/home/