Death is June- Vomitory : "All Heads Are Gonna Roll"

 Not only is this the Swedish band's 9th album but "All Heads are Gonna Roll" is their first album in 12 years. They play a very straight forward style of death metal that charges at you with it's foot pressed to the gas. While this worked for the opening song, half way into the second song, it loses it's grim luster, and it all begins to sound the same as the rapid fire stiff snare beat drones on. Lyrical they are going for a Cannibal Corpse thing, but the guitars make better use of harmony, showing some sense of nuance rather than brutality for the sake of it. They do however hit with more blunt force on "Ode to the Meat Saw". The rapid chug becomes more of a blur, and I begin to wish they changed the shade of blood red they are splattering my ears with. 

Production wise there is an epic wall of guitars. The low grunt of the growled vocals gives everything a uniform feel. The vocals could have been given more love in post-production if they were not so dry , the growls might have more personality than someone taking a painful shit. "The Deepest Tomb" highlights similar problems I have with some of the David Vincentl-ess Morbid Angel, the monotone one trick pony vocals, do not lend themselves to conveying even a full range of hatred. Some of the more mosh worthy riffs save the song, but not something that should be relied on. They continue to charge head first with "Piece by Stinking Piece". It is fast and intense, but mood wise does not strike me as being that dark or menacing. 

The mission statement for this album seems to be, why use dynamics when you can just speed things up. This finds the songs feeling rushed past me. It might have worked at first , but the lack of nuance begins to wear on me and finds the album beginning to give me a head ache. Even Deicide's most dense aggression has more texture and mood than this. They do grind into a darker place for "Dead Man Stalking". However the unrelenting buzz of guitars just creates a blurred blitz rather than tell this horror story. You can almost hear what might be a chorus. 

"Disciples of the Damned' finds them trying to make a fast song faster. The bass is the only thing that stands out in their sound ,as you can hear it rather than it being buried. Only interesting guitar harmonies are more often than not too little too late. There is not much to separate "Dead World" from the previous song. The Morbid Angel style riffs are cool, but the rule here is cool riffs alone does not a good song make, which is hard on these guys are they are lucky to allocate out a cool riff per song. They finally create some atmosphere and mood going into the last song, which begs the question why were you not doing this all along? It is doomier, so they have that going for the song. I will give this album a 6.5, they are a one trick pony with their songs all bleeding together due to the uniform sound. You might like this album, you might also like huffing gasoline. If you need a fix of generic 90s death metal, breath all that good stuff in. Metal Blade is enabling your habit here.