When it comes to Swedish death metal, often times bands try to find alternatives making the genre fresh and innovative to the best of its own availability. Wombbath, a artist who’s been around for nearly three decades of creating unrelenting death metal are back to create a astonishing record and possibly the best album to date. The Great Desolation is the third installation from these Swedish musicians and right off the bat, the instrumentals is bringing it to maximum intensities where everything becomes pummeling. From the great atmospheric passages to the Swedish and Finnish death metal Influences of Wombbath’s musical inspirations, The Great Desolation takes its purest form of monstrous heaviness and sheer brutality that’ll please any fans of the genre. Production wise, nothing but phenomenal as the sound is clear, raw and showcasing gritty late 80’s and 90’s European extreme metal.
This record does demonstrate some later melodic death metal, Carcass melodies with some of these tracks including Embrace Death, Punisher Of Broken Oaths and Cold Steel Salvation uses thick bass tones, down tuned guitars sounding dirty and raw and drums bring out bludgeoning doom-laced riffs with near funeral procession precision in the crisp drums, not to mention a superb traditional heavy metal inspired guitar solo that elevates the grit to heights of brief grandeur, something not delegated to their own performances. The Great Desolation managed to capture the glory days death metal in the nineties with nice touches of both Swedish and Finnish death metal bands. While the album may struggle to find its own counterparts, The Great Desolation does find Wombbath’s latest effort a magical musical experience of a lifetime.
Overall Score: 9.0/10
Review by Jake Butler
