Degradead – A World Destroyer

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Degradead are a band from Sweden who play melodic death metal. They were discovered by Jesper Strömblad who worked alongside Björn Gelotte, Peter Iweers and Daniel Svensson (all of In Flames) on their debut album Til Death Do Us Apart. In Gothenburg. So if your expectations for Degradead were anything other than a band who sound a bit like In Flames or Soilwork, then the problem is with your expectations, because the signs couldn’t be any clearer. A World Destroyer is album number three, and doesn’t offer any new surprises. This is very much commercial melodic death metal, conforming to a pretty standard template for the Gothenburg sound. It offers none of the genre’s more interesting and progressive tendencies, and sounds very geared to those that consider the genre their personal limits as far as heavy music is concerned. To be perfectly fair though, it does it reasonably well – there’s really nothing wrong with A World Destroyer, tracks like The Final Judgement are perfectly done melodeath songs. But there’s a lack of identifying features here, a lack of emotional and intellectual depth – this is vanilla flavoured melodic death metal and it has all been done before. The production is cookie-cutter melodeath, as are most of the songs – if you can’t get enough of that, then this is another album to add to your collection, otherwise there are far more interesting things going on in this genre.

Written by James Donovan
More: 2011, Albums, Death Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Degradead