I own pretty much every COB album, and even have a copy of one of the Inearthed sets in my collection, but the question that I have been asking myself for quite some time is are they still any good? Ask any self respecting metal journalist and he will tell you that COB are the best thing ever to come out of Scandanavia, and certainly they have sold a lot of records. But so has Justin Bieber so what does that prove? To me the last really good COB album was ‘Hate Crew Deathroll’, which featured the awesome “Needled 24 7”, and that since then it hasn’t all been as good as it might have been. Interesting to see that on MMA the first five albums get a 4* rating, yet the last two get 2 ½ and 3 respectively. So, it was with more than a little trepidation that I listened to this for the first time.
Even before putting it on the player I had the impression that we might be in for something a little different to recent years as while it has been recorded and produced by the band themselves, they have also brought in Peter Tägtgren (Hypocrisy, Pain). Peter is one of the top producers of this style of music, plus of course he also produced “Follow The Reaper’ which is certainly one of their finest works. I don’t know just how much impact he has had on the band in terms of musical performance and songwriting, but what I do know is that this is easily their best album for ten years. There is an anger and passion in the music and in Alex’s singing, while keyboard player Janne Wirman makes his presence felt with possibly his finest ever performance.
If you want melodic death metal played by the absolute masters of the scene then it just doesn’t get any better than this. Henkka and Jaske nail the bottom end, while Roope either links directly with Alex or provides the backing for him to go off and solo. There are times when it is still a bit too melodic and controlled for my liking, as I would prefer it to be even more raw and off the leash, but there is no doubt that these guys are back with an absolute vengeance.
www.nuclearblast.de
