Review by Sonny for Entombed - Left Hand Path (1990)

So, armed with my new-found knowledge of the Swedish death metal sound (thanks Ben and Daniel for enlightening me), I turn to Sweden's Entombed and their debut Left Hand Path. Now that it's been pointed out, the difference between the mainly US death metal that went before and the more heavily distorted sound produced by these Swedes is pretty obvious, even to my untrained ear. At the risk of being lambasted for such heresy, for me, this increased distortion and the wall-of-sound it creates (the buzzsaw sound) is a large distraction from the riffs, which feel like they are buried under a thick layer that takes away from their efficacy. A further result of this is that the lack of definition in the riffs means that the songs then seem to blur into one another and rob them of their individuality. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for heavy distortion (you can't be as big a doom fan as me without it) but I really don't feel it particularly adds anything to the death metal sound and this lack of definition in the riffs robs them of their power to my ears. That said, this does not make Left Hand Path a poor album, but I found I had to approach it from the point of view of the overall effect of it as a whole rather than focussing on individual tracks, the diversity of which isn't massive. When taken as such it is a fairly evil-sounding release and that guitar sound does have a kind of hypnotic effect if you stop trying to differentiate the riffs and let it just overwhelm you, a lot like listening to the droning of a large (angry) bee colony.

The rhythm section seems pretty solid, if not spectacular and the growls are suitably gruff and threatening. The lead guitar work though is possibly my favourite part of the album and the solos seem to have lost the chaotic, Slayeresque aspect of so many predecessors and, in fact, sound far more like the work James Murphy put in on Death's Spiritual Healing.

Overall, I understand why Entombed are beloved by death metal fans, their sound was certainly a new direction for death metal at the time, but I prefer the greater clarity of the US sound or, at the very least, the all-in atmospheric representation of decay and death as peddled by the likes of Autopsy and Sempiternal Deathreign.