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Deathgoat – Dragged into Realms Below

deathgoat – dragged into realms below

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Finland is a country that produces many excellent metal bands and certainly Deathgoat is no exception, these dudes are going to pummel you on “Dragged Into Realms Below”. This is the second album in this band’s ten or so year history and is a great blend of 1990s Swedish and Finnish Death Metal influences, if you enjoy bands like Purtenance or Funebre this will be something to check out. This is a very “swampy” album – it’s thick, humid and full of disgusting things. It begins with some dark and villainous guitar work that reminds me of bats swirling above. The tones are chunky and the drums sounds huge. The bass has a nice washed out fuzz to it which is churning and brewing beneath the surface. Fog hangs thick over the graveyard building up a charged atmosphere until the ground below caves into a portal to hell. There’s a low-end heavy mix here and every band member is nicely audible.

The low pitched vocals sound brutal and keep with the overall sonic depths. They sound like sounds emitted from some back corner of a cave, very brutal. The guitar solos are more flying high in the sky shredding “let’s rock” compared to more Slayer-esque whammy bar dive-bomb type of solos. There’s plenty of faster and mid paced sections mixed in but this album has this constant recall to these sections that bring down the tempo and are trudging forward musically, not quite a Doom Metal-level crawl but a medium/slow pace – being stuck in muddy bog while trying to move as fast as possible.

I really enjoy the title track and also ‘Compulsive Cannibalism’ the fifth track – there’s nice guitar solos and a slight touch of melodicism before the filthy trench warfare sections return to bombard the listener. It has these great mournful leads to it that made me think of something like Gorement on this song, I was doing some research on Metal Archives and found out later these guys were featured on a Dismember tribute compilation last year which makes sense – I can certainly hear elements of Swedish Death Metal in their sonic profile. Overall this is a potent album with teeth in the right areas, there’s tons of riding through the cemetery parts and heavy duty smashing calvary sections mixed with those ever present trudging forward toward death parts that have the musical equivalent of a disoriented soldier on a battlefield lost and stumbling into barbed wire. Fans of the Finnish/Swedish scenes do yourself a favor and throw this one on sometime.

Xtreem Music

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