Review by Felix on May 2, 2019.

Back in 2012, Psalms for the Dead was announced as the final album of Candlemass. How we love these nice promotion gimmicks. Either way, I bought this supposed legacy of the only doom band I really like. Pretty strange, I know why I do not like doom in general - I miss velocity and energy. But honestly speaking, I do not know why I enjoy exactly Candlemass. Well, at least their more modern full-lengths are surely not doom metal in its purest form. "Dancing in the Temple (Of the Mad Queen Bee)" almost flirts with pop in view of its very smooth, pretty melodic flow and the radio-friendly playtime. Nevertheless, slow or mid-paced rhythms still prevail and "energetic" is definitive no word that comes to my mind when listening Candlemass songs. This band scores with other features.

Robert Lowe's voice, for example, does definitely not suffer from a lack of charisma. From time to time, he sounds slightly cheesy, not only during the calm verses of "Waterwitch". But mostly he celebrates a powerful approach. He manages to appear trustworthy and a little bit demonic at the same time and while doing so, he matches the musical ideas of Leif Edling very well. Speaking of Leif, once again the only composer on this work, his riffs come up to my expectation. This experienced dude seems to have no problems in separating memorable from rather ineffective riffs. Or, second alternative, he writes one and the same riff again and again. Nobody knows it exactly! Psalms for the Dead has some sections that sound extremely typical for the Swedish authority. That's okay, but this recipe does not work in order to bring another classic to life. Given this situation, the "farewell album" cannot compete with the best outputs of Edling's doom machine. Well, that's how it goes if you have released fantastic works in the past.

Nonetheless, the songs rely on a stable substance and the technical execution is well done. Candlemass present their relatively dramatic tunes in a voluminous, warm and vigorous sound. The Hammond organ and the keyboards add a seventies feeling occasionally. I am no big friend of this decade, to say the least, but no rule is without exception. Maybe the synthetic solo in "Siren Song" is a little bit too much. However, we don't want to be too picky. The spoken intro of the closer is also dubious ("tick-tock tick-tock..."), but I guess I am at risk to get lost in detail. More generally, Candlemass find the balance between heaviness and melody very well and therefore it does not matter that more or less all songs have the same pace. Of higher relevance is their powerful appearance and their sometimes gloomy or morbid ("The Sound of Dying Demons") atmosphere. Unfortunately, it cannot be ignored that the band runs slightly out of breath during the playtime of 50 minutes. The fifth track marks the last highlight. But taken altogether, Psalms of the Dead marks a decent album - but no worthy legacy. And this is only one reason why it is good to have this band back.

Rating: 7.3 out of 10

Review by Carl on November 13, 2023.

Man, what happened? I liked the Pathological Primitivism compilation by these dudes well enough to buy their newest effort without checking into it beforehand, and it pains me to admit it, but this suuuuuuuuucks!!!! Is this a joke or something? Let's get deeper into this piece af afterbirth, because I'm so disappointed, I need to tell the masses, and because I don't have any social media to spew my disgust unto an uninterested world, this review will be the vehicle of my discontent.

The compilation mentioned was a collection of their first album and their demo, which combined a filthy form of death metal with goregrind parts, which was pretty great and especially enjoyable. It was heavy, it was dirty, and it simply kicked more ass than an abusive mormon father with a set of overactive loins. It had primitive blasting, menacing grunting, downtuned riffing and between that enough midtempo stomp to get the dancefloor shaking in a live setting for sure. The new album has the same ingredients present alright, but so damn toned-down, lackluster and put together so ill-advised that of their earlier menace not a lot has survived.

Where to start? The first thing that came to notice is the fact that the songs themselves simply suck. They come across as a bunch of separate parts that got hastily glued together, just to get an album out of the door. Was this whole album improvised in the studio, or something? It sounds like most of the material on here is first draft. At best. The individual tracks lack any aggression or atmosphere, being just a bunch of half-baked ideas that go nowhere until the next song comes along to go nowhere as well. And how is it even possible to make a filthy and sludgy guitar tone like this sound so goddamn nice and clean? This whole album sounds misplaced and especially weak throughout, and one of the few things I actually like about this thing, the grimy vocals, gets pushed into the background by this odd and way too slick production. The tin can sound of the drums don't help to alleviate this sense of disillusionment one iota. This whole thing sounds like they are just doing the first thing that came to mind, while sounding as slick as snot while doing it. Screw this!

Another thing that grated my nerves 'till no end is the copious amount of lead guitar work, giving me the impression that whenever the band did not know what to put in there, they just told the lead guitarist to just let it rip. Which he did, with all the fervour of someone who recently got knighted with a white Fender Stratocaster by none other than Yngwie Malmsteen himself. Was there really nobody present to tell him to tone it down a notch? Add to this a penchant of using discarded Black Sabbath/Kyuss riffs in some of the half-baked compositions present here, and I'm getting even more annoyed then I already was. I like Black Sabbath riffs a lot when Black Sabbath plays them. Or when Saint Vitus does. Or Cathedral, or whoever, but not when a grimy death metal/goregrind band does it. Especially not when it's this band, as it turns out. What were they thinking? And I'm almost forgetting the limp dick gang vocals that make the band sound like a washed-up 90's metalcore act.

Pretty much all of the songs on here blow the big one, with the only exception being the track 'Hide', which title could be advice from the band to the listener putting on this album. In places it might sound like something that Max Cavalera would have thrown in the bin circa 1998, but it's this one track that does touch on what has been before. Still no gem in any way, but better than what is present on the rest of this forsaken album, that's for sure. Too bad the band follows up the only half decent track on the album with an intermezzo that is so agonizingly irritating, I had to keep myself from chucking this cd out of the window.

I'm going to leave you with the advice to just check out Abraded's stuff before this album, and to simply avoid this thing. It's been a long time since I have been so thoroughly annoyed by such an unfocused hodge-podge of bad ideas and lackluster execution. I hope any next effort from Abraded will be better than this steaming heap of excrement. Not a high bar to cross, I'd think.

Cool cover art, though. I'll give 'em that.

Rating: 2.5 out of 10

Review by Carl on November 13, 2023.

Man, what happened? I liked the Pathological Primitivism compilation by these dudes well enough to buy their newest effort without checking into it beforehand, and it pains me to admit it, but this suuuuuuuuucks!!!! Is this a joke or something? Let's get deeper into this piece af afterbirth, because I'm so disappointed, I need to tell the masses, and because I don't have any social media to spew my disgust unto an uninterested world, this review will be the vehicle of my discontent.

The compilation mentioned was a collection of their first album and their demo, which combined a filthy form of death metal with goregrind parts, which was pretty great and especially enjoyable. It was heavy, it was dirty, and it simply kicked more ass than an abusive mormon father with a set of overactive loins. It had primitive blasting, menacing grunting, downtuned riffing and between that enough midtempo stomp to get the dancefloor shaking in a live setting for sure. The new album has the same ingredients present alright, but so damn toned-down, lackluster and put together so ill-advised that of their earlier menace not a lot has survived.

Where to start? The first thing that came to notice is the fact that the songs themselves simply suck. They come across as a bunch of separate parts that got hastily glued together, just to get an album out of the door. Was this whole album improvised in the studio, or something? It sounds like most of the material on here is first draft. At best. The individual tracks lack any aggression or atmosphere, being just a bunch of half-baked ideas that go nowhere until the next song comes along to go nowhere as well. And how is it even possible to make a filthy and sludgy guitar tone like this sound so goddamn nice and clean? This whole album sounds misplaced and especially weak throughout, and one of the few things I actually like about this thing, the grimy vocals, gets pushed into the background by this odd and way too slick production. The tin can sound of the drums don't help to alleviate this sense of disillusionment one iota. This whole thing sounds like they are just doing the first thing that came to mind, while sounding as slick as snot while doing it. Screw this!

Another thing that grated my nerves 'till no end is the copious amount of lead guitar work, giving me the impression that whenever the band did not know what to put in there, they just told the lead guitarist to just let it rip. Which he did, with all the fervour of someone who recently got knighted with a white Fender Stratocaster by none other than Yngwie Malmsteen himself. Was there really nobody present to tell him to tone it down a notch? Add to this a penchant of using discarded Black Sabbath/Kyuss riffs in some of the half-baked compositions present here, and I'm getting even more annoyed then I already was. I like Black Sabbath riffs a lot when Black Sabbath plays them. Or when Saint Vitus does. Or Cathedral, or whoever, but not when a grimy death metal/goregrind band does it. Especially not when it's this band, as it turns out. What were they thinking? And I'm almost forgetting the limp dick gang vocals that make the band sound like a washed-up 90's metalcore act.

Pretty much all of the songs on here blow the big one, with the only exception being the track 'Hide', which title could be advice from the band to the listener putting on this album. In places it might sound like something that Max Cavalera would have thrown in the bin circa 1998, but it's this one track that does touch on what has been before. Still no gem in any way, but better than what is present on the rest of this forsaken album, that's for sure. Too bad the band follows up the only half decent track on the album with an intermezzo that is so agonizingly irritating, I had to keep myself from chucking this cd out of the window.

I'm going to leave you with the advice to just check out Abraded's stuff before this album, and to simply avoid this thing. It's been a long time since I have been so thoroughly annoyed by such an unfocused hodge-podge of bad ideas and lackluster execution. I hope any next effort from Abraded will be better than this steaming heap of excrement. Not a high bar to cross, I'd think.

Cool cover art, though. I'll give 'em that.

Rating: 2.5 out of 10