Raging Death

At first glance, it would be easy to dismiss Entrails as another band looking to pay tribute to the gloriously heavy days of Swedish metal in the early '90s. The thing is, though, the band didn't really get rolling until 2008; they actually formed in 1991, where guitarist and band mastermind Jimmy Lundqvist laid out a lot of the riffs that would go on to make up not only parts of the band's first two records, but also bits and pieces of their third album, Raging Death. What comes through right away is the guitar tone, with its perfect blend of thickness and crunch feeling like a portal to the days when the fat distortion that was the backbone of Swedish death metal was (and perhaps still is) the heaviest thing to come out of an amp. Immediately afterwards you're hit by just how punishing the album is. These songs aren't here to dazzle you with their speed or virtuosity. Instead, they offer up the fat slabs of classic riffage that seek only to crush the listener under their immense weight, bringing a muscularity to the table that's hard to fake. Like a caveman trapped in ice, Entrails have a sound that isn't so much a new take on something old, but rather a preservation of the old ways. While this means that Raging Death doesn't really offer much in the way of innovation, it does an exemplary job of perfectly re-creating a classic sound that will definitely resonate with fans of bands like Entombed and Dismember. ~ Gregory Heaney