This is a well-travelled disc. Stormgrey themselves hail from Lithuania, not exactly a hotbed of extremity looking at Metal Archives. The label are French and they posted it out to us in England. A month later it finally arrives with a stamp on the battered envelope saying it was missent via India! This is a bit of a DNA of Chaos in itself and naturally apologies for the lateness of the review. These things aside, what we have here is 38 minutes of good old school death metal and a band comprising of five members following up their debut Pray.Crawl.Suffer from 2015.
It’s immediately noticeable that the Jens Borgen Fascination Street mastering is formidable as ‘When Blood Runs Cold’ rumbles into action. The drumming is particularly meaty throughout and delivers a solid battering. Vocalist Andrius has a hoary growl and the twin guitars and bass chug and rumble completing the flattening curve. There’s plenty of groove and the chunkiness of the assault gets you straight between the ears. There’s a bit of a breakdown and tempos are varied rather than being an all-out wrecking ball of ballast and the wolverine growls give it a bit of a Dutch Van Drunen vibe that should have fans of Asphyx et al salivating.
The 8 tracks come thick and fast, powerful and rugged as they steamroller over us. There’s some neat winding guitar signatures to ‘Suicide For Pleasure’ and ‘666’ with its title spat out with venomous fury has it hurtling straight down the left-hand path. Once fully immersed in Stormgrey’s ‘Womb Of Darkness’ it’s impossible to not be taken back to the glory days. This is not a particularly obvious album in days of Swedeath HM2 retro-activeness and certainly does not have you guessing it’s country of origin before you hit a couple of numbers. It’s an album that is without trends and one that has a stench of rottenness about it like rancid meat that’s been left in a cupboard to gestate over time and become a breeding ground for maggots and flies. There’s also something about the vocals that reminds a little of Godflesh as they boom out too and the bombast as the label points out has more than a touch of Bolt Thrower to it. With this in mind one can’t help but think this could well be a long-lost relic from the late 80’s and the glory days of Earache. Whatever the scene is like in Vilnius I can imagine that along with some live shows Stormgrey could well pick up fans both home and abroad; who knows maybe as far afield as India too.
(7/10 Pete Woods)
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