Grave - 'Burial Ground'

Swedish Death Metal lives!

Burial Ground is easily the best album to be unleashed from the Stockholm death metal vets in Grave since their 2002 reunion with Back From the Grave. Though Grave has never really been mentioned in the same revered breath as their contemporaries in Entombed or Dismember, the band have always been reliable, and have been delivering solid gold beatings since the late '80s.

Burial Ground crushes with that typical, mid-tempo steamroll sound popularized by Grave on such legit genre classics as the 1991/92 back-to-back bum-rush of Into the Grave and You’ll Never See. Moreover, the balance of this doom sound—perfected on the band’s underrated Soulless LP in 1994—with that patented Swedish oompa-thoompa one-two drum madness makes everything sound just so…comforting.

While this may be a strange word to describe a death metal album, the fact that bands such as Grave are still kicking, providing the goods for a new generation of metalheads to enjoy, is something to appreciate, particularly within this modern era of Pro-Tooled, auto-tuned, pitch-corrected and overtly technical fretboard masturbation disguised as death metal.

With Burial Ground, Grave proves that the old flame still burns, and its guardians can still stack up to just about anyone going in the game today.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.