Review of Incurso by Spawn of Possession

Third album, and first in five years, from one of Sweden's premier technical death metal bands. Sometimes I think that everyone in Sweden must be in a metal band. Which is a great notion.

First track Abodement is a short instrumental and is interesting. The guitars have a melodic ring to them and the drums complement them well. But immediately into track two and all the weapons of technical death metal jab you in the face and there they remain.

The but at the beginning of that last sentence highlights my misgivings with this kind of stuff.

There is honestly no need for me to do a track by track breakdown because they all sound the same. This is both its strength and its fundamental weakness.

For fans, all the tracks sound the same. Huzzah!

For non-fans, all the tracks sound the same. Doh.

I cannot distinguish between any of the tracks. They all hammer along at 1000 miles an hour with an occasional pause before the fury resumes.

Put simply, the better these people are at their instruments, the less I want to listen to them.

Is that so terrible?

Do you get what I'm saying?

Everything is impossibly fast, impossibly fierce, impossibly precise...yet its still possible to put this on and after ten minutes forget its there.

Considering the band are Swedish I wonder why they sing in English. I mean, it can't be for commercial reasons, can it? Actually forget that comment. They may well be singing in Swedish. Or Swahili. Or Klingon. Its impossible to tell and doesn't really matter either way. A guttural growl is a guttural growl.

Now that I come to think of it, Klingon would be a great language to sing metal in.

But I digress.

One thing that does intrigue me about Spawn of Possession is how they work out their material. Its all so complex, with lightning fast tempo changes every other bar, I wonder how they build it all up into a song. Maybe they create complex mathematical equations and then play them. That's what it sounds like. Fair play to them for that.

It sounds like I'm being harsh. I guess I am. But actually I don't dislike it. I just don't like it enough. I can't see how anyone can. You can admire it, sure, but music is not for admiring.

Music is to stir your heart and burnish your soul.

Isn't it?