If there’s one important thing Sweden has brought to the world of extremity, it is DEATH FUCKING METAL of the purest and most heavy persuasion. Enter Crawl, another cog in the endless turning wheel of death, and their full length debut ‘Rituals’, brought to us this August by the finder of endless treasures, Kunal at Transcending Obscurity.
It seems totally unfair to do this, but when Crawl come from a country with a whole litany of iconic death metal bands, you’ll forgive me for mentioning them frequently. But ‘Reject the Cross’ is pure Dismember worship, and it is fucking great. The titanic ‘Trail of Traitors’ also channels the heaviest moments of Grave. The riffs have that almost natural chainsaw tone, the pace is chugging and the vocals are dense. There is more than a dash of crust and hardcore punk about this too however; take the pacey ‘Black Rituals’ or the rampant ‘Cowards’ for example. I mean, the whole album is barely 25 minutes, which is a perfect excuse to slap it straight back on when it is done.
Equal parts chainsawing death metal, crust attitude and a love letter to the days of simpler, savager metal, ‘Rituals’ can stake Crawl’s claim to join the death metal luminaries of Sweden. From a label that has treated Ursinne, Paganizer and Henry Kane so well, they’ll be in good company at TO, and ‘Rituals’ fits straight in with that kind of quality.
https://www.facebook.com/CRAWLSWE
The Killchain 