Guillain Barre

If nothing else, Guillain Barre has some seriously good artwork. It screams "this is a death metal classic!" before you've even heard the music.

I wouldn't call this album a classic, but it is very good. I checked out this album due to being a fan of the current Colombian death metal scene (perhaps the best country for death metal), although this preceeds much of the modern brutal stuff as it was released in '96 and the band have been together since '91. So as you can expect, it's rooted strongly in the old-school death metal sound. Closest comparison would be Bolt Thrower, although I'm not a massive follower of Bolt Thrower (as of yet) so that might be a tad off. What you have is riffs borrowed from the stylings of Slayer and Sepultura, with a powerful guttural vocalist that growls pretty low although doesn't gurgle incoherently, he still innunciates everything clearly. The songwriting is pretty powerful, lots of tempo changes, climatic build-ups and releases and the like. It's not just pure bludgeoning though, there are the occasional melodic clean-picked sections, not just in the intro and outro but making appearances in a few other tracks, like Sala 8.

The production is pretty raw but I like it, the bass has a sharp twang to it (not to the extremes of Leishmaniasis on their debut that would come out a year later, but it still stands out) and the drums really hammer on top sometimes, total battery and as far as I'm concerned it works very well. You can tell it was recorded live and it pretty much comes off as a very well-recorded rehearsal.

Guillain Barre is not an essential album by any means, but it's definitely well worth owning if you're a death metal fan, makes for an enjoyable listen every now and then and would look nice in anybody's collection. Not sure how rare this is nowadays but if you can't find a copy it's pretty easy to find online so make sure you don't skip this one.