Ribspreader

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Band(s): Ribspreader
Label(s): Xtreem Music
Release Format(s): CD
Release Year: 2024
Review Date: March 24, 2024
Author(s): FelixS

Although having come across the name before, I first really heard about Ribspreader with their 2007 ‘The Monolith’ 7” EP by Blood Harvest, a label that I religiously followed at the time. Like many of the early Blood Harvest releases, I devoured this EP, yet my enthusiasm for Ribspreader quickly waned as the band increasingly turned out to be a one-trick pony that started to crank out rather mediocre affairs. Yet, in the years that followed Ribspreader-main man Rogga Johansson started a trillion of other bands that would be even more interchangeable or even just plain boring, making Ribspreader one of his more reasonably good bands.

Admitted, some of the previously released Ribspreader albums were enjoyable, yet none of them turned out to be really inspirational. A quick look behind into Ribspreader’s back catalogue learns that 2016’s ‘Suicide Gate – A Bridge to Death’ can be regarded as the band’s finest hour, but that will largely depend on a bit of personal taste and frame of reference, because each album does have a somewhat different sound. On the 2016 album the typical Swedish Death Metal sound is a bit more obvious and the last album, ‘Crypt World’ (2022) sounds particularly less heavy and therefore a bit fragile. Hence, it does not surprise that ‘Reap Humanity,’ the tenth album by now, sounds slightly different again…

Although ‘Reap Humanity’ will not gain the band any new fans (any more than it will lose them) and the album follows the same familiar Rogga-formula, a path that he never seems to dare to leave, it really feels like the band has given the album a bit more attention than the preceding ‘Crypt World’. That last album was a downright snoozer of an Death Metal album, it offered nothing that particularly stuck. Compared to that album, ‘Reap Humanity’ sounds way heavier and even though it largely evolves just around the never-changing same mid-tempo riffs and static drumming, the music sounds even quite atmospheric. The album’s nice and organic production is making the big difference and makes it stand out from the entire and extensive Ribspreader/Johansson discography.

Does the more dense and natural sound save the album from being less average? No, not really. Therefore the Rogga-formula of writing music is not only too predictable and too safe, it mostly is just too simple and one-dimensional. I still love my fair share of Old School Death Metal, but it fore sure needs to have sufficient bite and pungency and none of that is to be found on any of Rogga’s records, this new album included.

VM-UNDERGROUND

Extreme Metal Fanzine est. 2012

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Ribspreader – Reap Humanity

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