Paganizer – Flesh Requiem
Release Date: 1st November 2024
Label: Transcending Obscurity Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Old School Death Metal, Death Metal, Swedish Style Death Metal, Swedeath.
FFO: Entombed, Dismember, Edge of Sanity, Desultory, Abscession, Typhonian, Vanhelgd.
Review By: Andy Spoon
Swedish Death Metal heroes Paganizer are set to release their anticipated album Flesh Requiem on November 1, 2024 on extreme metal label Transcending Obscurity Records. I was happy to spin this album after posting a positive review of their last album Beyond The Macabre in 2022. I feel that this experience will be totally different from the Paganizer of 2022, as the band doesn’t feel they are in their same mindset, to the same extent.
Immediately, I noticed that the guitars used some old-school effects that brought an interesting tone to many of the tracks, including a flanger effect on Hunger for Meat, which I thought added a cool effect to the Swedish style guitar grind. There are tracks in which the band digs deep into the oldest of old school death metal, harkening back to the early 1990s, even. I’m not entirely sure that I felt it totally blended with the rest of the album, but I can certainly appreciate how Paganizer wanted to pay tribute to the origin of the sound they’ve mastered over the decades.
The band claims that Flesh Requiem is more thoughtful and efficient than their last offering, something that I think I can notice once they’ve pointed it out. I think it’s not as “heavy” in my perception as the band’s last album, but I think that it’s because of the inclusion of a holistic ideal to the album, meaning that the tracks seem to lend themselves to the album, not just a mixtape-type of release. Again, this is merely my impression. Your mileage may vary.
The band believes this is their best work to date. I’m not sure if I’m ready to make that claim on their behalf, but it’s good to know that an artist believes certain work to be more inspired than other work. It allows the listener to spend more thoughtful time listening to the album – denying the guilty pleasure of the shallow-listening experience. I think that’s clear here with the flow of the album. It’s clearly more of an “album” than the last album that I reviewed, which was a collection of nasty tracks. That’s not to say that one is better than another. For someone like me, however, I prefer an album to a mixtape. The whole album is a piece of art, rather than each three minute burst of expression. There can be much more dynamics in that context.
I particularly enjoyed Fare Thee Well (Burn In Hell), which was one of the tracks that I listened to multiple times. The intro on that track really got my blood racing – with an absolutely furious attack and tempo. I think that ¾ of the tracks on the album have that distinct Paganizer sound that has got us all hooked for many years now. The sonically-cooler, less-brutal tracks seemed to be what the band portrayed as their “tuneful expressions”, something that offered a break from the traditional Paganizer riffs, allowing a different overall tone. That being said, it’s like going from a habanero pepper to a jalapeño pepper. They’re both still pretty spicy, but there’s a distinct difference between the two if taken back to back. My favorite of the darker, moodier tunes was Suffer Again, which features a guitar minor chord progression in the refrain that I think I’m not sure I’ve heard before in a metal track, which I thought was just beautiful.
One of the weird things that I noticed that threw me for a loop was the syncopation on many of the tracks. It might have been a trick of the recording, or a flaw in the playing from the guitars or the drums, but there were several points across the album that felt out of “time”, especially during really fast parts such as blast beats. I think that it might be the recording effect, perhaps, but I found it noticeable. I remember playing drums on an album where the reverb effects took some of the clean cut out of the drum section, making it sound like I was missing hits by a fraction of a second. I think that could be happening here. There is a distinct slap back echo in stereo on most of the album for the drums that might cause noticeable syncopation inconsistencies. This is only my opinion, not being asserted as a fact, however. If I’m wrong on this, I’ll shoulder the blame for being too picky.
Overall, I think that the album is a success. They took an artistic leap and I think that it paid off. There are definitely 3–4 tracks on the album that I would consider their “deeper”, more melancholy tracks. I particularly liked Suffer Again, which is also probably my favorite track on the album, in a death metal ballad – sort of way. I think that the production on the album could have used another view, as I think that there might have been some issues with the use of studio effects here and there. Overall, it’s an above-average listen that should absolutely be ridden hard and put away wet if you’re a fan of complicated Swedish Death Metal and OSDM.
(3 / 5)
