Take three unashamed Deff Metulz heads from that most renowned city of Stockholm, give them an HM-2 pedal, a huge guitar stack, a heritage that includes Dismember, At The Gates and Entombed and, courtesy of Lawrence Mackrory, a stunning sonic assault that takes all the best aspects of Sunlight Studios merged with today’s production values of volume and clarity, and stand back and wait… for your face to be pinned to the wall behind you as the hurricane of Swedish Death Metallage assaults you with unrestrained glee.

Fair play to Lik because Carnage (Metal Blade) is an utter, utter beast of an album.

Thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, every trope you want and need from such an album is littered throughout with wilful abandon; gravelly, grinding riffs, Chris Barkensjö’s riotous d-beating, dirty, grooving Death Metal, sandpaper vocals and a more than occasional twisted, oppressive melody hammered out of Tomas Åkvik’s savage six-stringery… this is the Swedish Death Metal works… the Metalverk if you will.

You could be a prick-lipped pedant and becry “Oh, but there is nothing new” about Carnage but when it’s put together this well such trivialities matter not, and I for one am now well over myself and any previous purist pretentious sense of caring whether something progresses music or metal as an art form anymore, because the grin is so wide within minutes of the meathook splattermania of ‘To Kill’ ripping out of the blocks that any posturing is ripped to shreds, devoured and shat out by this grimy, Scando-DeathFest.

What shines through most of all is the sheer love emanating from the maggoty outpourings that Lik batter into your conscious is that there is a natural joy and enthusiasm prevalent in every second of Carnage. This is a band that love what they do, and don’t just do it well, they do it spectacularly well… There’s little need to look for a deep or nasty, lengthy critical overview here; just take my word for it, if dirty Stockholm riffage is in anyway on your radar, you need to devour this (d)ripping corpse of Swedish Death Metal that could comfortably have been excreted by any of the unholy triumvirate named above as a fitting successor to their respective albums.

The most fun you can have without actually getting down with the dead men.

8.5/10

STEVE TOVEY