THIS WEEK IN CLEVELAND

Fatalist Attraction
Entombed lead a new wave of old-school Swedish metal

Ask your average music fan to name the most important and influential group to ever come out of Sweden and the answer will be Abba. Ask a metalhead the same question, and he'll tell you about Entombed. Daniel Ekeroth — author of the obsessive, passionate, and personal genre history Swedish Death Metal — says, "The Scandinavian metal scene would never have exploded without them. They changed everything. They were way ahead of any other Swedish band around 1990, with better songs, better sound, and above all, they were much better musicians than the rest."

That about covers it. The band formed in 1987 as Nihilist, blending Discharge's raging punk with Motörhead's speed-crazed metal with a side of distinctive distorted guitar tone. Rejecting the crisp, martial discipline of U.S. death-metal bands like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse, they pioneered a looser, more groove-oriented sound known as "death 'n' roll." After splitting with bassist Johnny Hedlund, who soon formed Unleashed, they changed their name to Entombed and released 1990's Left Hand Path.

The album created a sensation throughout the worldwide metal community almost as soon as it was released. Its raw power and ferocious intensity were most apparent in Lars-Göran Petrov's gravelly, roaring vocals. Instead of the guttural grunts and blood-gargling sounds of other death-metal singers, Petrov came at the listener like an enraged bear. And behind him, the band straight-up rocked, attracting listeners from across the global underground, a fan base that remains united to this day. As the frontman points out, "If we play festivals around Europe, there are punks and death-metal people, everyone just headbanging to it. It's good to connect those different people to each other."

Last month marked the 20th anniversary of Left Hand Path, but unlike Slayer and Megadeth — who are co-headlining a tour and playing their 1990 releases, Seasons in the Abyss and Rust in Peace, front-to-back — Entombed aren't planning any elaborate celebrations. "It actually just passed by us somehow," laughs Petrov.

They'd rather look forward. Though peers like Grave and Dismember quickly emulated their style — creating the impression that, like AC/DC or the Ramones, every album is more or less the same — Entombed tweaked their sound quite a bit over the years. Uprising (from 2000) threw some bluesy riffs and rock grooves into the sonic stew, 2001's Morning Star was sweeping and epic, and 2003's Inferno had a punky edge and a deliberately rough mix. The group has also covered songs by a wide range of bands (Venom, Kiss, Hüsker Dü, Alice Cooper, Stiff Little Fingers, and Bob Dylan, to name a few) that can be heard on 2002's two-CD Sons of Satan Praise the Lord.

The common denominator is a loose, live feel that Petrov says is a main goal. "We try to do it as good as we can, but you have to have that live feeling," he says. "If you record something in one take and it sounds good and it doesn't have to be perfect, then we just leave it that way. There's nothing wrong with being perfectionist, but it loses the spontaneity."

The only misstep Entombed ever made is 1998's Same Difference. At the suggestion of their new record company, they steered into an alternative-rock direction, with Petrov adopting a clean singing voice, and guitarists Alex Hellid and Uffe Cederlund cutting way back on their distortion. "We had a record label that wanted to try new things, and we're always open to new stuff," he says. "But I think it was too much astray from what we wanted. I wasn't too comfortable recording that."

Entombed haven't released an album since 2007's Serpent Saints — The Ten Amendments. The band isn't even seriously planning one at the moment, but Petrov says it's got some new songs. "We just gotta put them together," he says. "We don't want to rush and just put out an album because we have to. It's just a matter of sitting down, putting [the songs] together, and recording it. We go once or twice a week to rehearse, but we mostly rehearse old songs. But once we have time, we will sit down and concentrate on the new songs."

These days, there are young bands explicitly modeling themselves on Entombed's pioneering Scandinavian death-metal sound — like California's Fatalist, who even use the same font Entombed uses for their logo. Petrov knows about the youngsters, and it makes him laugh. "It is exactly the logo," he says. "I think it's great. Somebody's taking over — they're following in our footsteps. We have some bands here in Sweden that are holding the flag for old school. It's the new wave of Swedish old school."

POLE POSITION

Behemoth aren't just your everyday, run-of-the-mill death-metal band
[From the Cleveland Scene]

A lot of death metal is interchangeable — and that's coming from a fan of the genre. But there's no mistaking Behemoth. The Polish trio spent the last dozen years, roughly since 1999's Satanica and 2000's Thelema.6, trying to engulf the world in the sonic equivalent of a firestorm. Drummer Zbigniew Robert Prominski, a.k.a. "Inferno," plays some of the most powerful blast beats in death metal, hammering at the snare like he's firing a chain gun, as the double kick drums knock holes into your skull. Meanwhile, singer-guitarist Adam "Nergal" Darski fires off ferocious guitar riffs that trade the typical death-metal rhythmic grinding for a more anthemic, relentlessly destructive sound — he's going for overwhelming power from first note to last, and often comes closer to Psalm 69-era Ministry than, say, Cannibal Corpse.

But Darksi's vocals really get your attention. He avoids the typical extreme-metal guttural croak/bark, instead ranting and roaring like a blast furnace. It's such a distinctive, almost inhuman sound that the obvious question is what kind of effects pedal does he use to achieve it?

"What you can hear is pretty much my voice," he says. "Sometimes I just double it or triple it. That's how you get the impression that there's a few people screaming."

Darski believes there are a lot of misconceptions about Behemoth. One of the major ones is that the group made a major stylistic shift in 2000, abandoning the black metal of its first three albums in favor of a more death-metal sound. "Our style has been evolving throughout the years; every record is different," he asserts with some accuracy. "I wouldn't really say that after Thelema.6 we changed. If you listen to each one of our nine albums, each one is different. It's constant evolution."

This constant evolution is particularly surprising given that the current lineup — with Inferno on drums and Tomasz "Orion" Wróblewski on bass — has been together since 2003 (Inferno's actually been drumming for Behemoth since 1997).

"Because we've written so much music, it's more and more difficult to come up with something that's gonna be Behemoth style at the same time that it's fresh and challenging," says Darski. "We can't just get in a rehearsal room and throw ideas at each other and the song comes out. It's a much longer and more painful process."

For this reason, he has decided it's important to make each Behemoth album a statement. This means abandoning a longstanding practice of releasing EPs of B-sides, live tracks and cover songs between albums. One of these five- or six-track releases has followed every Behemoth disc since Thelema.6, and the range of covers Behemoth has essayed over the years is surprising, to say the least. They've offered their own roaring take on other extreme metal bands' work (Morbid Angel's "Day of Suffering," Mayhem's "Carnage," Venom's "Welcome to Hell"), but they've also released versions of David Bowie's "Hello Spaceboy," Nine Inch Nails' "Wish" and the Ramones' "I'm Not Jesus." But no more.

"There's gonna be no more small releases; it just makes no sense," says Darksi. "I want people to wait for another album. I want them to anticipate — to be really, really hungry for the next Behemoth opus. I don't want to distract their hunger with a small release. We will release a DVD, but that's a different story. There will be no musical release from Behemoth this year or in 2011."

Two years should be just about long enough to absorb the band's most recent album. Evangelion came out in August and topped many metal critics' year-end lists. It's not as florid or ambitious as 2004's Demigod, which featured synths simulating an orchestra and a male choir, but it contains some of the most powerful songs the band has ever written. "Alas, the Lord Is Upon Me" finds Darski combining the black-metal spirit of the band's early days with the ultra-aggressive blasting of their more recent work, while the doom-haunted "Ov Fire and the Void" is possibly the slowest song in their discography. Meanwhile, the album's epic closing track, "Lucifer," uses a poem by Polish poet Tadeusz Miciski as its lyrics.

That's a surprising gesture on Darski's part. He's tended to ignore his homeland's culture, preferring to write songs employing imagery from various ancient lands, including Babylon (Nergal, his stage name, was a Babylonian deity) and other Middle Eastern countries. But as he makes very clear, it's always metaphorical.

"We're not Nile, we're not Absu, we're not Melechesh," he says, citing other extreme metal bands who make the ancient desert tribes their primary subject matter. "We write about our lives, our perspectives, our point of view. We just wrap it up in this Biblical ancient stuff."

Part of that desire to look outside may be rooted in Behemoth's relative obscurity in Poland — which is ironic since Darski is engaged to Dorota "Doda" Rabczewska, one of Poland's biggest female pop stars.

"She's big, she's a star," he says. "We're just an extreme-metal band who happen to be recognized by a larger audience. But our music is anti-mainstream, basically. You can sell a certain amount of records, and this is it. We've sold 15,000 records in Poland, and I don't really think it's going to be easy to surpass those numbers. We can't do much better than that. But we'll see — maybe I'm wrong."