ENTOMBED A.D.
Bowels Of Earth
CENTURY MEDIA Swedish diehards tighten the noose on album three
THERE WAS AN undeniable logic to LG Petrov’s decision to keep the Entombed flag flying under a new-ish name back in 2014. In the absence of the definitive article, Entombed A.D. have been doing the decent thing: playing classics from the legendary Swedes’ revered catalogue at live shows and bashing out albums that, while hardly earth-shattering, were brutal and boisterous enough to justify the continued use of that name. But now that Alex Hellid has revived the Entombed mothership, Entombed A.D. have slightly more to prove on album number three.
If there was a problem with 2014’s Back To The Front debut and its 2016 follow-up, Dead Dawn, it was that the Swedes’ songwriting never quite matched the sharpness and bite of the greatest Entombed songs, overburdened with roll and a little lacking in the death department. It seems highly unlikely that the songs on Bowels Of Earth were written with some underlying career agenda in mind, but everything from opening assault of Torment Remains to the closing spookfest of To Eternal Night should really be accompanied by the sound of a giant iron gauntlet being tossed to the floor.
While it’s not exactly a wholesale transformation, Bowels Of Earth is the first Entombed A.D. album that feels free from the band’s debt to a towering legacy. Tighter, faster, much more vicious and wielding far more sonic heft than their predecessors, songs like heads-down sprints Hell Is My Home and Through The
Eyes Of The Gods hark back to the skewed hookiness of death metal’s early 90s heyday, while Bourbon Nightmare and their cover of Hank Williams’ I’ll Never Get Out Of
This World Alive slam Discharge-style punk and creepy doom-death together in a charged shower of poisoned beer and broken teeth. Done and dusted in an admirably snappy 36 minutes, Bowels Of Earth is where Entombed A.D. truly go it alone.
FOR FANS OF: Unleashed, Firespawn, Black Breath