Grave
As Rapture Comes

Do you fancy a good blow to the teeth, maybe without warning? Do you fancy having your bones shattered recklessly? Well, if so, musically speaking, look no further, get yourself some band-aids, bandages and whatever else, put this latest work from the historic Grave in your player and make yourself comfortable.

"As Rapture Comes" (2006) is a true steamroller album, an unstoppable bone crusher, that will skin you from head to toe.

Hard, massive, powerful Swedish death metal, made by those who significantly contributed to create the genre almost twenty years ago.

Those looking for innovation, refined sounds are warned, nothing (or almost, and we'll discuss more later) has changed since the debut "Into the Grave" (1991). Guitars tuned in B, with the typical sound of Soulless Studio from producer/musician/socialite Peter Tagtgren (Hypocrisy, Pain), bass well audible and just distorted enough to have a roaring and metallic effect, pounding and very audible drums in their furious blast accelerations, psychotic solos, a constant musical seesaw made of monstrous attacks unleashing an unusual power and obligatory slowdowns never too doom-laden (just to pay homage to the clichés of the genre, with a remarkable inclination to the mythological Celtic Frost of "To Mega Therion" era above all), no alienating foray into the most prosaic brutal, only pure vintage or damned death metal, given the demonical/apocalyptic themes, judgment day-like, so much so as to wonder what might be going through the mind of the main songwriter and historical leader Ola Lindgren (guitar and vocals). Completing the line-up of this album are also the second guitarist Jonas Torndal, Fredrik Isaksson on bass and Pelle Ekegren on drums (notable his work, simple, effective, and impactful).

What immediately catches the eye scrolling through the track list is the presence of a cover of "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains, not something easily predictable if performed by a band like Grave, dedicated to sounds extremely distant from the Seattle sound (grunge is really a word I do not appreciate) of the first half of the nineties. But how does this cover sound? Fantastic, quite faithful to the original (furthermore, in my opinion, one of the best tracks on "Dirt", along with "Sickman" and "Would"), yet loaded with an aggressiveness and a flavor unknown to Alice in Chains themselves. Truly peculiar.

So if the aforementioned cover is the "summa" of the originality (!!!!) present on this "As Rapture Comes", let's move on to mention the classic valuable death songs present: well, I'd say the powerful opener "Burn" (great initial riff), the following "Through Eternity" (rich in very groovy parts, somewhat reminiscent of something from the latest Morbid Angel), the truly furious and retro-flavored "By Demons Breed" and the dissonant "Battle of Eden".

In conclusion, a great return for the Swedish quartet, where all the known peculiarities of their sound are respected without any compromise, 40 minutes of sonic mayhem delivered with great intensity and passion.

For connoisseurs.