Left Hand Path

If ever there was an album that was incredibly overrated by the metal purists and something I disliked, surely Entombed's "Left Hand Path" would be one of the first albums to pop up in my mind. People say that this is the ultimate death metal album, and an album "so good there would've been no need for another death metal album", but I couldn't disagree more. This album might have influenced tons of bands, but it has lots of drawbacks in and on itself. I think the only reason this album is praised as much as it is must be because of the sound of the album, especially the guitars, and I think another strong reason for its praise is the time it was released around. How many death metal bands were out there in the early 90s, especially in Sweden? Not many that I can recount at the top of my head, so this kind of makes more sense to me why it's praised so much.

Now, people say that the songs are all different on this album, but that's clearly false. The songs mostly sound all the same, and they aren't very catchy either. The songs that were decipherable from the others were the ever-infamous title-track, "Revel in Flesh", "Supposed to Rot", and "Bitter Loss", but they all still sounded pretty similar at the end of the day. The infamous S.M.G.T. (Swedish Metal Guitar Tone) on the guitars sucks. That's it, I said it! I didn't want to go there, but this tone has been overused so much and gets praised so fucking much that it has just pushed my buttons too many times! I basically don't need to say anything else, but because it would be against the guidelines to write a review with a lack of detail, I will do it anyway. The guitar tone is too fuzzy and has a narrow dynamic range, only distorting and muffling the notes they play. It's honestly not even all that different from other guitar sounds that were created prior to 1989. However, the lead work is definitely good, just not all that memorable and not detailed.

But the guitars aren't the only problem. The drums bring this album down by a lot too. They don't evolve and mostly are the same for the entire duration of the record. At least in "Revel in Flesh" there's blast beats, but that's about everything remarkable I can say about the drums. The drum rhythms vary between slow grooves, midpaced fast patterns, and then the extremely repetitive fast drum beat at somewhere 240 bpm that accompanies about 80% of the duration of the album, which just proves the repetitiveness on here. The drums themselves sound artificial, although not fake, it seems like they used electronic drums to record the album, which I personally can't really criticize, but real drums would've probably sounded better. And then there's the bass guitar. It's clean, and it's not very decipherable when all the other instruments play. When revealed in "Bitter Loss" somewhere at 0:24 you can hear that it has flanger on it. Now, I don't know who in the world thought there should be fucking FLANGER, of all things and effects, on bass! You could've just left it clean OR it could've had some overdrive or fuzz instead, which probably would've saved it from being forgettable, and bass with overdrive can bring an album to life by a lot. But well, no one really cares about that instrument when you are playing basic death metal, but flanger is just the most pointless shit you could use as an always-on effect on an instrument. Or maybe it was just used on the part where the bass gets exposed, you can't hear it any other time on the record, and it has no audible treble either, so I guess we'll never know.

Now the vocals. I don't hate people, I can only hate their music or what they do. So with that being said, I have nothing against Petrov as a person, kudos to him for being very passionate about metal, but I'm not going to let the fact that he's dead stop my criticism of his vocal skills. His vocals are not evil and he has too many voice-cracks, and some of his yells are very goofy. He barks most of the time and doesn't really change his vocal style at all, besides yelling a bit in a few places, so what is it really that makes Petrov so great? At least the vocals aren't unlistenable, they're just really boring and basic. The lyrics are okay. Pretty well written, although they're not really worth being inspired by. At least they're not as basic as lyrics from Roxette, also fellow Swedes.

Production wise, for the 90s this sounds okay, but I feel like it could've been a lot better if it had more middle and lower frequencies, and it wasn't so fond of the treble. I have nothing against albums with a raw production, but here the production is raw in a bitter sense. Songwriting-wise this album's very boring, and only interesting in a few places. What's the brilliance in this record? I don't get it. Am I supposed to be drunk to think this is genius? Surely the band members have talent, but in this album and with this sound it really wasn't executed that way. It's more basic than I prefer my death metal to be, but hey, maybe that's the point! What do most death metal bands try to achieve other than making heaviest music on the planet?

In conclusion, this album's very mediocre, considering all the hype and the positive recognition everyone seems to flail around about it. And the outcome of my review is pretty mediocre too! I really hoped I was going to make this a big statement and that I was going to be able to finish it earlier, but well, that's what I get for thinking. Anyway, don't believe the hype. There's lots of other great old-school death metal out there than this. Honestly, I find some In Flames and Soilwork, and even Mustasch albums to be better than this. If the riffs were INTERESTING I would've been okay with them repeating a lot. But that's the problem! They aren't interesting! I guess this says it all. If you LOVE death metal and you listen to death metal and death metal only 24/7, surely you will dig the fuck out of this, but if you're more into variation and interesting passages like I am, then I suggest you check out something else. This album isn't terrible, but very basic and overrated, especially when it comes to extreme metal standards. Go better check out some other Swedish band! Not Razorrape though, okay?