Clandestine

Let's get right down to it, the review title says it all. Now, it happens I grow 39 years old right today and I'm such a nostalgic mood; I'm picking up old records from my extremely wide collection and I can't help noticing this work is very inferior to its forerunner "Left hand path", it's something as clear as the light of the sun if only you listen to them the former close to this one I'm speaking of.

That Entombed created a way of playing out of anything I guess it is something given as an axiom. Did any band play something similar to them in those early days? I can't recall any name..., and once they reached the highest point of quality with their first release,we should have expected a lower one in their follow-up releases. Can anyone write and play only masterpieces? No band ever did, let's be honest. But we should have had something more interesting to listen to rather than this tired "Clandestine", basically similar in the guitar sounds and compositive approach to the previous one and yet lacking the freshness and the surprise effect we had appreciated so much back in 1990.

Bass and drums still create the powerfull wall of sound we would expect to find in a swedish death metal album, guitars buzz and crush the whole thing out of the stereo, but believe me, after a long time (20 years... oh my god) it is truly impossible to avoid noticing the compositions lack of variety, they lack of the gift of inspiration and they give the unpleasant impression that all these riffs have been rehearsed after having been sunk in oblivion then resurrected because there was anything better to work with.

Nicke Andersson's vocals are nearly terrible. Are them death metal? Nowhere near L.G. Petrov's ones, they paved the way for what would have come later, a progressive and inexorable detaching from their death metal roots until their music turned up to be some rock and roll played with heavily distorted guitars and over-exposed drums and bass.

So, what we have got here is a fourty minutes of something still pretending to be death metal but already preferring to be something else, better if more attractive for a wider listening public. We're speaking of times when records still used to sell a load of copies... The catchy melodies of which all the songs are imbibed will enchant someone disaccustomed to what is real death metal and will surely let him think this album is very good and I'm talking crap since 30 minutes or something, but if you just scratch out the surface you'll find nothing less than an album which disappointed me 20 years ago and I have never rehabilitated: much show and very little behind it. 65 is even too much, but it gets this because... well... what they've done later is so terrible that even "Clandestine" rises up above the horizon. After all these years I ripened the opinion Entombed had a shot alone with "Left hand path" and then fell down into a soft but unavoidable decay.