Lik rises from the grave.
For the release of Necro, their fourth album, Chris Barkensjö (drums/vocals, Mefisto, ex-Witchery, ex-The Resistance), Tomas Åkvik (guitar/vocals, Nale, Bloodbath), Niklas “Nille” Sandin (guitar, Katatonia, ex-Sodomisery) and Joakim “Myre” Antman (bass, Diatonic, ex-Decadence) renew their collaboration with Metal Blade Records.
We get off to a fast start with Deceased and its pure Swedish HM-2 sound overlaying catchy riffs before the vocalists add their raw touch between two sharp lead parts. The track remains focused on pure violence, but there are a few lighter notes just before War Praise takes its place, quickly focusing on ominous melodies before unleashing its full power in waves. The heady refrains give birth to a wishingly Old School double solo, before finally heading off to They, where the anguished harmonies are tinged with a martial rhythm that knows perfectly well how to be extremely heavy and jerky, like Worms Inside, which plays on fairly regular rhythm changes to make our skulls shake frantically. The bass welcomes us on Morgue Rat and immediately imposes its massive groove, a little slower but just as effective and, above all, very dark to receive the vocal eruption of Linnea Landstedt (Trotoar, Tyranex) before its heavy final that leads to Shred into Pieces, a fairly short track where their Swedish roots are fully exploited at a moderate pace. In Ruins begins slowly enough, revealing a certain melancholy, before returning to the path of rage and non-stop pounding in the company of Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost, Bloodbath) until the band once again expresses itself in slowness to join The Stockholm Massacre. The track – quite short, by the way – in turn pours out its bloody riffs punctuated by a few more melodious passages, as do the opening moments of Fields of Death, which will give the track its epic aura as much in the moments of pure fury as on the slower final. The musicians follow up with the lengthy Rotten Inferno, a final composition which adopts a slightly more oppressive rhythm than the preceding compositions, and allows the band to play on macabre tonalities to conclude.
If you want to introduce Swedish Death to someone who knows nothing about it, Lik is the perfect candidate in terms of recent bands! Necro has absorbed all the essence of the scene’s forty years, and spit it back out in extremely tasty, morbid and aggressive tones.
95/100