Grave - Dominion VIII
Regain Records - 21 April 2008
By Brandon Peters
Grave is an old school death metal band from Sweden, and they play simple riffs in a pretty brutal fashion. The brutalness of
Grave isn’t anything like the new wave of brutal death metal bands; however, they’ve always had pummeling, heavy riffs and create the brutality without loads of pointless blastbeats.
Grave have never been the top of the genre, but always worthy of mention and repeated listens.
In their newest album,
Dominion VII,
Grave continues with their pummeling riffs, deep vocals, and just pure emotion and anger. The riffs vary from the sweeping tremolo picked riffs you expect from old school Swedish death metal bands, but they do a great job at combining this with crushing death/doom riffs. This creates and atmosphere that one would expect from an old school death metal band, evil and hate filled.
Dominion VIII will not blow your balls off with two hundred hooks in the album or the atmosphere, but what they do well is songwriting;
Grave’s ability to work riffs in and out of a particular song is outstanding, making the listener head bang. The vocals on the album are of the usual old school death metal style, deep and gaseous, which are used on top of the melodies of the guitars; moreover, the guitars and the vocals are the main focus while the drumming takes to the background. This is perfectly okay and doesn’t hinder the album; moreover, it lets the best parts of the album shine and keeps the songs moving.
Dominion VIII doesn’t break any grounds nor does it shine over any of their previous albums; however, I find the album easy to listen to and generally entertaining. It is more of a background album, but some of the riffs come out and smash you to pieces, like the main riff on
'Bloodpath'. Are you a
Grave fan? Buy the fucking album!
The Official Grave Website
The Official Grave Myspace
The Official Regain Records Website
