Fleshcrawl - As Blood Rains From the Sky... We Walk the Path of Endless Fire
Review: To continue its addition to an expanding repertoire of strikingly "Swedish-sounding" metal in not just production but melody, rhythm,and vocal delivery, the band Fleshcrawl produce an epic in the style of those who having mastered a form decide to play with it on a more broadly accessible level, but here make it succeed with less subtle but more sensually gratifying composition that dedicates its melodic lead composition to the harmonic space allotted through a blues-scale modality providing a convenience of familiar tonal rotation.
Impressively Fleshcrawl hold true to their style while laying out downright catchy, almost pop tunes crafted from a blasting blur of bass and percussion, offering mostly on the second "side" of this CD more intricate fare, including some excellent harmonizations to provide internally melodic, lush metal that is reminiscent of Unanimated. Nicely it is fit together into a consistent package, with the rushing tempo restlessness that made earlier Fleshcrawl an expanding depth of rhythm. The dynamic intensity and neo-classicist atonal composition from previous albums is of varying strength in this new incarnation, with songs ranging from grippingly focused and tense to almost background music like techno or most heavy metal.
While this is the simplest metal so far from Fleshcrawl, it is also the most audience-friendly, with constant melodic hooks and an aerobic sense of rhythm. Song structures have stretched out to give a clearer view for the media-saturated crowd of what's going on, but despite this and the more rock-n-roll style composition the band maintain a solid death metal focus that, like Entombed's "Clandestine," aims for the grandeur of simple forces in conflict with an epic storyline. This is a far cry from commercial metal sensu Six Feet Under or Amorphis and suggests to the fans of simpler, more "mainstream" extreme music a new direction in which to travel.