Imperishable is ready to move on.
Following their debut album for Hammerhart Records, the band led by Henric Skoog (vocals, Nominon), Robin Holmberg (guitar, Vampire), Christopher Hjelte (bass, Exterminated, ex-Dr. Living Dead!) and Niklas Holmberg (drums, Toxaemia, Vampire) reveal Swallowing the World.
Bells opens the album with a fairly calm introduction, but soon Melodic Death’s fury takes over and lacerates us from all sides, thanks to piercing harmonics and powerful vocals. We find this fierce Swedish touch again, just as on Blood To Bleed, where the jerky approach allows the melodies to develop aggressively at a steady pace, while still finding a way to accelerate to pour out their solos. The band would have us believe in a moment of relaxation on Where No One Survives, but riffs quickly come back to prove us wrong, openly displaying more macabre and disturbing tones, whether in the vocals or the instrumentals. Riding Demons returns to more epic tones, with a few Power Metal touches adding moments of gentleness, then the airy finale leads us into The Remembering, where we can really breathe with just a few soaring notes. Back to violence and saturation for Cenotaph Of Dreams, where the rhythmic pattern proves lively and effective, leaving the harmonics to become more intriguing at times, before transforming into truly hypnotic notes on Out Of The Night. While this track is of course just as devastating as the others, it allows itself a few more soaring flights of fancy, sometimes borrowed from heavy metal, before joining The Erosion Of Reason, which gently prepares us for the final track, the eponymous Swallowing The World, whose leads continue in the same vein as the interlude, and where the band doesn’t hold back in redoubling their efforts to make this last composition the furriest and most surprising on the album, especially vocally.
With Imperishable, Melodic Death takes on a sometimes Old School tinge, but above all it’s dark and disturbing. Swallowing the World is just as capable of making you shake your head frantically as it is of oppressing you with its piercing leads.
85/100