Album Review: Paganizer - Flesh Requiem
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
You might think you like death metal. Hell, some of you might even go so far as to say you love it. Can’t get enough of the stuff, you might say. Morn, noon, and night, it’s all you can listen to. Wake up with a smile to “None So Vile”, do your profession with “Dawn of Possession”, and then go to sleep with “Shadows in the Deep”. So you might well consider yourself something of a death metal devotee.
But you’re wrong.
Because you see, no one – no one – loves death metal like Rogga Johansson does.
Paganizer alone have a careers worth of albums released, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Rogga – then you’ve got Bloodgut, Ribspreader, Down Among the Dead Men...on and on and on. He makes Agathocles look like they have a sluggish release schedule. And perhaps inevitably that sheer quantity of releases may dilute the quality somewhat, because unfortunately “Flesh Requiem” really isn’t doing much for me.
Upfront, this is a decent album. I want to make that clear because an awful lot of this review is going to be rather critical. This is a solid bit of modern Swedeath, and if you like this brand of band, then you will likely as not find something to enjoy here. But I can’t imagine you ever being elated by or even especially enthusiastic about it. And that’s really down to the problematic foible of this thing being almost impressively generic. To the point that it’s almost difficult to talk about, but every chord progression, every riff, every drum beat, every stray atom of conception and composition here has been done before. It nails its colours to the mast of that late 80's early 90’s Swedish death metal sound and steadfastly refuses to budge, come hell or high water. And fine, there’s nothing inherently wrong with casting an eye back to the classics of yesteryear for inspiration, but it’s hard to recommend an album when it offers functionally nothing of note of its own accord. The songs are, for the most part, fine. “Hunger For Meat” offers a brief spell of aggression, “Life of Decay” has a positively rambunctious drop back into it’s introductory riff at the 2.13 point, and “Flesh Requiem” has a nifty section towards the end where a chorus repeat ascends in key, which I liked.
But It all feels rather...quotidian. Rote. By the numbers. Rogga evidently has a healthy passion for this music but that unfortunately hasn’t manifested in something worth searching out. So many riffs just follow the 1st measure of the beat, or rely on basic punk patterns to get the job done. None of it execrable obviously, but just boring. I look within the annals of Swedish Death and find only questions; why listen to the Amon Amarth homage of “World Scythe” over the real article? At points the album almost seems to plagiarise itself – “Suffer Again” has a riff that’s very similar to the aforementioned one in “Life of Decay” for one example, and the introductory passages of both “Viking Supremacy” and “The Pyroclastic Excursions” bear a passing resemblance too. I feel somewhat bad, so let me reiterate that I don’t think this is a poor album by any means – over the hours I’ve spent with it, I’ve enjoyed it each time, I’m just not remotely excited or surprised by it. It never inflames the passions, and while it feels mean to damn “Flesh Requiem” with faint praise by calling it adequate, that’s unfortunately the best assessment I can give.
The whole album just makes me wonder why I’m not listening to Dismember instead. It feels almost too civilised for it’s genre, not fast enough to really start the flaying process, never slow enough to really stretch out the torture, not raw enough on the production side to really feel the pressure washer stripping your epidermis, not progressive enough to really tweak the higher brain functions...it just sort of exists, as an unremarkable example of a specific style. As such I can only suggest it to absolute obsessives of Swedish death, the type that sleeps under a blanket of HM-2 pedals, can understand the language of chainsaws, and had to have paramedics prise their genitalia free from the hole in the middle of their “Left Hand Path” vinyl. For anyone else there’s just too many albums – many of which “Flesh Requiem” is actively aping – that fit the bill of “this, but better” to recommend Paganizer’s latest.
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