Unleashed
Odalheim

Swedish band Unleashed has ten albums already behind them and two of which has been reviewed here, their latest one was not really to my liking. But now there’s a new album on its way and it continues the bands established theme of vikings and all of that stuff in nordic mythology. The cover artwork comes as they go in the more primitive kind of death metal, it is boring and ugly. Odalheim is the name of this eleventh album in the story of these guys and a question arises, how to last as a death metal band of that particular style? you know that style isn’t really that varied so it might be hard to stay fresh for such a long period of time. Thing is though that they seem to be quite respected in the genre so they might have something to show for it, their musical legacy at least consists of quite a bit of music that’s for sure.

And musically it is not that different from what we have heard before, the music is a sort of primitive death metal that is rather sterile. Guitars are aggressive and so are drums and stuff, the vocals are sort of slow, like a tired bear or a lion on morphine. They feel a bit tame to be honest, sure their music is competently made and the singer has a good dictation so you understand what he says in different to many similar bands. Production is alright, maybe a little polished for the genre which might offend someone who thinks this kind of music should sound like a crappy cheap production. It is a ten track forty minute album that has little to no variation through these songs and minutes, not the most fantasy-rich production you can imagine might be a clever thing to write and the same goes to say that the album has nothing that really makes it stand out from the crowds of other death metal bands that are the similars of Unleashed.

Is this the music for my longboat? I would not say that it is, I would select something else for the longboat journey, maybe Stormwarrior or something like that. I think this album feels tired, inoffensive, fitting for children and so on and so forth and that is something I don’t think a death metal album should be. One thing it should not be is boring and this is borderline boring but maybe not entirely. I think the main problems are the vocals that are the thing that sort of slows this album down and slows it down a lot and it does not matter how much brutality there is in the material itself and maybe this answers the question on how to remain interesting after many albums in this genre. They don’t.

I think the best way to describe this album is to say that it is uninspiring and tiring, like a cold winter night with intense snowfall and cold winds, you just want to hide beneath a warm blanket and forget about the world outside with a good DVD or something like that. The best thing about this album is that it is so boring that I don’t really need to listen to it while writing this review so I have been able to watch a lot of episodes of my favourite show while writing this review. They do a good work and are liked by the fans it seems from the few reviews I have seen but that seems to be mostly true if you are lost at that genre. So with competent production they are not bad but neither are they good, they just sort of are… yeah, that is what they are just there.