“Dark Chapters” is the seventh full-length album from the Swedish metalheads Those Who Bring The Torture, and it was released this autumn via Iron, Blood and Death Corporation. And although their music still has extreme roots and is related to the canons of death metal, it sounds far more melodic and modern. So no nostalgic DM evenings this time from these productive Swedes.
This year the project of Rogga Johansson underwent some changes; two new musicians have joined the band, so no doubt, that “Dark Chapters” was influenced by the fresh ideas from them, but one thing has remained unchanged – the memorable catchiness of the songs. Rogga is famous for his productiveness not only with Those Who Bring The Torture, he has lots of other bands and projects (for example, “Paganizer” or lately “Massacre”), so evidently he’s very serious towards the extreme music.
This half-hour album is a bit repetitive; schematically the songs are similar to one another – fast and furious verses with melodic choruses and speedy thrashy solos. Rhythmically “Dark Chapters” is ferocious and rapid, except a couple of slow, almost doomy guitar passages (“Born to Cleanse” and “From the Vortex They Came”). Sometimes the aggressiveness is declining, and then melodic and quiet musical pieces come up, but not for a long time, returning once again to familiar death hammering. Death/thrash core is the key to utter heaviness (like the song “Dark Chapters”) bordering with punky temper (“Dammed the Universe”), but melodic death metal passages lighten the general mood of the compositions. “The Malevolent World” is totally out of death metal, it is basic modern mdm song in the vein of “In Flames”, but death’n’roll influence (especially on “Carved into Pieces” and “Into the Fleshfields”) reminds the prime days of “Six Feet Under”. So this album is full of the piercing guitar riffs, the shrieking solos, the speedy drums and extremely low bass lines, whereas the deep growling (and occasional screams) completes the harmonic perception of this dynamic and impetuous music.
Besides the rich melodic parts Those Who Bring The Torture started to sound more epic, and the cover art nobly illustrates their love for dark fantasy. For now everything is in moderation, but considering the fact, that their earlier music was labelled as death/grindcore, maybe they should meet the same fate as Carcass, who completely switched to MDM.
Release date: September 30th, 2020
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