Album Review: Organic - Where Graves Abound
Reviewed by Sam Jones
With album art like the one Organic have applied to their second full length release, Where Graves Abound, how was I not supposed to check this record out? Formed in 2013 and hailing out from Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy, Organic are a band who, since this album was teased and officially announced, have been signed on to Testimony Records. Its certainly a step up for a young band considering how their first 2014 Demo, Death Battalion, and soon enough their debut full length titled Carved In Flesh, released in 2018, were each released independently. There have been a few albums due for release this October that I was curious about and Where Graves Abound was one of them. In addition, its been a while since I checked out some Italian extreme metal so let’s take a lift under the hood and peer at what precisely Organic have in store for us, with their first album on a signed record label.
Opening with an angelic cry that quickly and effectively settles us in, the band soon waste no time in getting down to business with their onslaught of death metal. What will instantly strike you, I think, is the ripping guitar tone the riffs sport as the band only continues to play. Organic boast a very Swedish death metal-esque approach to their guitar tone throughout their performance however it’s the kind that is very open to the vacant sky as opposed to being confined and funnelled through a very concise and narrow channel. Dismember death metal this is not, as the band only continue to demonstrate with a guitar attack that doesn’t hold back. What is interesting though is that during changes in riff approaches, the guitar sound noticeably changes. As a result you’ll be quickly taught that while the guitar work feels very open and possesses this rusting and coarse texture to its sound, the riff work can also be rather dynamic and swiftly changes from one part of a track to the next. The band keep things alive, ultimately, through a combination of songwriting and blunt force fury.
There are a few moments on this album where the songwriting seriously comes alive and you can just feel that innate urge to bang your head come to fruition. “Waste Monolith” will soon enough drive you to headbanging whether you originally wished to or not, part of this comes out of the band’s desire not to create track progressions that feel stale or predictable. By this point in the record, just the second track, the audience is now more open to what the band will do next seeing as they’ve already broken a potentially formulaic routine of established meat-and-potatoes death metal. Half of this reason falls to the drums yet while they’re not precisely going to give you anything you haven’t heard before, their willingness to break the predictability of the songwriting along with the riffs is what makes this band’s songwriting so enthralling to me. On the immediate exterior this band sounds like so many others we’ve heard before yet the deeper we dive in the more there is to discover. What’s more the drums can be heard pretty decently, they’re not drowned out by the powerful guitar work one bit and it’s a clean strike we get from there too. It’s perfectly balanced between wanton destruction and a coherent audibility.
Amongst the more quaint and illusive things going on here must be the Bass work. From the outset your attention is going to be focused on the primary guitar work as is expected, but a few tracks in you may find yourself picking up on the duller sounding yet more polished basslines that can be heard seemingly right at the back of the album’s sound. The bass here isn’t fighting for your attention but is like that quiet student at the back of the classroom taking the notes for the group project, without that bass the band’s sound would adequately function and we’d just have an albeit savage riff tone that wouldn’t have anything concrete to act as the record’s bedrock. That’s the purpose of the bass here; grounding the album’s sound in something that isn’t necessarily obvious or vital to your overall entertainment of Organic’s work, and yet certainly injects another layer to the band’s total performance. Once you’ve picked out th bass it’ll be difficult not to pay attention to it, and since it is quite far back in the mix it’ll only draw you in deeper to the band’s primal, snarling jaws.
I appreciate how the band’s notion of speed and power isn’t rooted directly in how quickly they can generally play. When you pay attention to the riffs and the building strength that only continues to stack as each respective track plays out, it’s difficult not to notice a rolling, rampant rage that is soon clutching at your torso and wants blood. It’s the kind of performance you can really get behind because it’s not the actual speed of the band’s performance that creates such a ferocity to the record’s timbre, rather it’s the after effect of such a visceral and uncaring form of instrumentation on display. A track like “Fall, Rot” demonstrates this with exemplary impact as the band only seem to gather additional ire and malice whether through a dynamically shifting tempo, drums that change up their patterns or vocals that slow down in corroboration with the instrumentation itself etc in order to establish this rolling and thunderous form of death metal that is more akin to a charging and wild beast than some lean and broken creature of man’s control. But that makes it all the more thrilling and intoxicatingly curious, as if on approach to the very thing you know you cannot control but cannot help yourself getting closer to. It’s an adrenaline rush.
In conclusion and closing out with a darker variation of the angelic singing that first greeted us right back at the beginning, Organic have surprised me. I admittedly can be a little on the fence with Swedish-sounding death metal, sometimes I can be a little nulled by the constant drive for a ripping or buzzsaw blade tone that might be empowering to hear. But I personally feel like some bands can lose their desire for competent songwriting as a result, thankfully I can confirm that Organic absolutely do not fall into this unfortunate category. Pretty early on into Where Graves Abound I recognised I was fully hooked and thus on board with the band’s more animalistic take on death metal than I immediately thought I would be. The band take full advantage of the particularly wild guitar tone they’re sporting and utilise it for maximum devastation as one can imagine great hordes being cut down just by the sheer serration this bladed guitar tone wields. But it’s how the songwriting implements it as well; tracks here aren’t just your run of the mill piece where it’s purely the ripping riffs carrying the band from one track to the next. Changes in tempo and direction across various tracks as well as some solos here and there, aid the band at establishing themselves as something unique within the Swedish-inspired death metal scene as well as having something genuinely fresh to bring to the table. By the end of this record I was thoroughly up for a few more tracks but it had to come to an end at some point. I really liked this album, it definitely grew on me.
