Albums

Album Review: Disfear

Album: Live The Storm
Label: Relapse Records

Sweden’s huge “dis” music scene, where the spiked drumbeat is king, has been headed for many years now by Disfear. With numerous albums and band line-ups behind them it’s been a long wait since their last album. They’ve added Entombed guitarist, Uffe Cederlund, who has brought with him a new injection of songwriting talent, and recruited Kurt Ballou, of Converge fame, to engineer the album. The result is 9 short, punchy tracks totalling a mere 32 minutes (apparently the finished album will have 10, so still no epic) – a real speed-lovers feast of blistering fretwork, violent vocal rasping and grimy, chugging guitars.It begins with a real rock groove, bringing to mind early-Motorhead, with cascading guitar slides, echoing vocals, pounding bass-lines and big blast-out climaxes. ‘The Cage’ is the first track to take us to a grimier place as the sound is dirtied up and the drums begin to bubble underneath, spitting and popping their rhythm out. ‘The Furnace’ is a true vehicle for the demon larynx of Tomas Lindberg. He croaks himself hoarse almost imploring us to scream with him; each line an angry tirade. The riffs are immense, the noise becoming a crescendo with each new chord change, and yet they’ve saved the real masterpiece for the finish. ‘Phantom’, at a full 7 minutes, features buzzing chords over an avalanche of toms building to rapid snare-fire and insistent hi-hat. The vocals kick in at full pelt and take us snarling, spitting to a piercing guitar and ultimately to howling feedback and intermittent white noise. It’s a monster of a track, nay, of an album, and it burns powerfully brightly and scars deeply.

For fans of: Rise And Fall, Motorhead, Entombed
Band links = Disfear

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Tags: album, cd, disfear, motorhead, review, rock, rise and fall, entombed, live the storm

This review originally appeared in Subba-Cultcha.

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