Born and raised in a country whose metal bands shamelessly
shoplift enough Iron Maiden to warrant musical plagiarism suits to
be filed, Sweden's Crowpath outshine the hamfisted hordes of
hackneyed copycats with their debut masterpiece of abrasive
anti-melody, Red On Chrome. The 13-track, 30-minute
mammoth was recorded by Fredrik Reinedahl (In Flames, Burst,
Gadget, Dimension Zero) and wields an absolute air of clarity and
nucklebusting crunch rarely heard in a time of tin can production
values. Fusing the drunken, staggered grooves of latter-day
Coalesce with Immolation's trance-inducing sense of rhythm and
dynamics, Crowpath triumphs in carving out an album that extracts
the most violent, technically-obsessed aspects from modern death
metal and intrinsically filters them through the urgent
unpredictability of grindcore.