Having listened to an obscene amount of death metal, a lot of it including Swedeath over the years, I’ve reached a point in my metal journey where I see a new Swedeath album and groan, because it’s most likely going to be another band beating an extremely dead horse. Enter Crawl. I had expectations about this going in from their split with Feral since, unlike Feral, they added a dash of grind into their sound, making them more unique in a sea of faceless entities. Coupled with the fact their debut album Rituals sounded fresher than other bands in the Swedeath style from 2018, I thought sophomore album Altar of Disgust would be another breath of fresh air in this sound. Unfortunately, this is another tried-and-true Swedeath album, and while rabid fans of this blend of death metal will be chomping at the bit, it leaves me disappointed.
Altar of Disgust sounds exactly as you would expect. Buzzsaw guitars, crusty songs, and snarled vocal lines, with nothing sticking out in the first three-quarters of the record as anything remotely different from similar sounding bands, with most of the tracks sounding like generic Swedeath. None of the proper songs are bad, however. Crawl as a unit know how to write decent songs, but it’s not until track ten, “Into Sordid Rifts”, when something interesting happens. This is the album highlight, and that’s because Crawl decides to deviate from the unending sound of the Dismember/Entrails worship and add in some blackened sections. I could listen to this specific song on repeat, but I can’t say the same for the rest of the offerings on the Altar. The most offensive song is easily “Where No Light Escapes”, given that it’s a two-and-a-half minute interlude on a thirty minute album, something wholly unnecessary—samples, build-up, and not much else. The ending track “Buried Lust” also begins promising, shows a hint of the grind from previous releases, and then ends on a sample, making it a rather tepid closer.
Again, the proper tracks are all competently written, and are fun with a beer or two, but Swedeath as a whole is perhaps the most over saturated sound in metal aside from black metal. For a band to stick out amongst the rest, it needs to have its own sense of identity. I can’t say I’ll be revisiting Altar of Disgust too much down the road, and that’s a shame. I was hoping for more of the sound that made me intrigued in the first place, but if I want to pick up some newer Swedeath, I’ll probably stick with labelmates Vomitheist.
