There’s nothing wrong with just picking something you’re good at and sticking with that. Some of Metal’s most influential and respected bands have become so through a lifetime spent mastering one narrow subgenre, but it’s a difficult road to tread – standing out above other bands while deliberately playing generic music is often a lot harder than being weird for its own sake.
Out Of Respect For The Dead (Century Media) is Grave’s eleventh full-length album since 1991, and anyone who comes to it expecting anything other than unrepentant, old-school Swedish Death Metal has made a grievous error, but you might not be expecting a group of veterans to sound quite so savage. From the moment ‘Mass Grave Mass’ bursts out of its fairly innocuous intro into a full-on face-kicking, it’s clear that over two decades of playing this style haven’t wearied them in the slightest, and the savage pace continues across the whole album, relenting only for the purpose of delivering crushing, Doom-tinged slow passages.
Unfortunately, the price they pay for this level of aggression is a loss of character, and it’s a price that may not be worth it. Old-school Death Metal can’t stand alongside some of the newer hybrids for sheer aggression – it’s the ability to juggle violence with sinister melody that keeps the style so appealing, and Out Of Respect… shows rather less of that than it should. Tracks tend to bleed into each other with little to separate them, and though they can catch your attention through sheer Fucking Hell aggression, they find keeping it much harder. At a time when old-school DM is so well represented by both fellow veterans Autopsy and Bloodbath (whose Grand Morbid Funeral stands as a modern classic of the style) and newer colleagues like Disma and Vastum, Grave are very notably lacking the personal touch that would make them stand out.
Out Of Respect For The Dead is, beyond question, a solid and competent album of genuinely savage Death Metal, but in a field already full of similar releases, it’s hard to really recommend it above anything else.
6.0/10
RICHIE HR