Review Defueld - Defueld 2009

The opening track is named Spawn, maybe it means spawn of a new career or something like that. As you may or may not deduct from my clever opening, this is the first album of these guys hailing from the Swedish capital city. They have according to some place on the interweb been a band since 2003 and now six years later they debut on record. They have already played at such an obscure location as Senegal in front of something like 6000 enthusiastic Senegalese fans and much to the praise of the press and musical press in that very same nation. This is for some reason taking up a lot of space in the promotional information that accompanies this record, it appears that it is something unique and it is being used as a selling point. How much of this is loose bits from texts is impossible to judge but for sure all companies wish to sell their artist and Defueld might just be good enough to be sold. No matter what they are you will know when you have read through the entire review.

Musically this band spans quite some distance, between piano pieces and very heavy thrashy metal. They have much nuance in their music and the music could be said it be based in the Bay Area-thrash movement, you know the one a certain American band with a Danish drummer confessed to in their early years. Most of it is heavy but there are lighter pieces and passages, the vocals are rather varied as well, between clean singing all the way to the more brutal side of singing. All in all a rather diverse album with clean production.

The production is really a strong point to this record as it is spot on, not too dirty and not too clean and plastic. It is a difficult album to review and I have heard it several times now, more than twice the number I would need to make a fair review normally. The thing is that you hear and perceive it to be much more diverse than it really is and it takes some time to reach the conclusion that this is more neatly packed than it is really needed, the box promises more than it contains is another way to put it. Thing is that under the mask of diversity, the band is rather bland and unimaginative but it takes quite some time to reach that conclusion but it is reachable.

Still the unimaginative thing is not really all that fair but it is an attempt to illustrate what is going on when listening to this album. There are enough variation not to get too boring and it is easy enough to contain a degree of interest and the good songs like Spawn, Crime of the Century, Retarded and the beautiful closing ballad Blind makes this album worthwhile though maybe not in the really long run but it is still a very nice record.

Also, considering the fact that this is a debut album this carries quite a bit of promise for the future. Lets just hope the band develop their good sides and concentrates on what they are good at, then I believe this to be the spawn of a new fantastic band.

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