Revolting
Hymns Of Ghastly Horror
5
Revolting plays Swedish Death Metal. Their newest, Hymns of Ghastly Horror, is performed at a moderate tempo and produced like a modern Aborted album. Basically, it's the same album they made last year, though it leans ever-so-slightly more toward melodic death metal than the traditional Stockholm style. It's an okay album.
But, it's boring. And it's tame.
And it's cowardly, because it makes not even a passing effort to explore the vast terrain within the creative boundaries of death metal, rigid though they may be. And it's cynical, because it presupposes the critical community will be satisfied with an album that that coasts on execution. And it's predictable, because you've heard those tremolo melodies on “Psychoplasmics” and “Prey to Katahdin” too many times before.
This style of death metal is so creatively threadbare that even the retro-death apologia has become its own sort of cliché. The thing is, Revolting has really only made an effort here insofar as they've trained themselves to the point where they can play moderately tough compositions and not sound like they haven't done it before. But they haven't challenged themselves creatively, nor will this challenge anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the genre and its broad cannon of more daring albums.
