Disfear - Live The Storm (Relapse)
There is a reason why Disfear seems to take for fucking ever to release an album. Their formula is particularly limiting and, to be honest, an album every other year would probably result in a certain degree of ambivalence among the populous. The other reason is that these Swedes keep busy with other projects, carefully honing their chops until they regroup a half-decade later under the Disfear banner and unleash a monumentally rewarding effort of full-on metallic crust.
Live The Storm is thirty-five minutes worth of lager-ready gang chants, pick-scraping punctuations, and fist-throwing anthems that are sure to please anyone who’s proud to embrace their knuckle-dragging heredity.
Yes, this is dirt-under-the-fingernails stuff totally devoid of pretense and wonderfully captured in timeless production that’ll be just as greasy in twenty years as it is now. At the same time, listeners expecting something beyond D-beat drum patterns (think of the drum intro of Black Flag’s “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” at double-speed and you’ll get a good idea of what that term means) and crunchy guitar riffs that barely fret beyond the key of C-minor should stay close to their more featherweight playlists.
Disfear’s lethal weapon is vocalist Tomas Lindberg, a thirty-five year old screamer who’s shred his larynx in over a dozen different bands in the past two decades. Not much has changed in his delivery with each line-up that he has participated in, but then again, there’s little that he needs to change. The main reason he’s in such high demand is because Lindberg consistently manages to stand tall against every Marshall stack and bass drum kick that he’s up against and, as Live The Storm demonstrates, he succeeds admirably.
Underneath every out-of-breath track is a foundation of cone-destroying guitar work, wonderfully indebted to Fast Eddie Clark to the point where the album opener, “Get It Off,” sounds like Disfear’s answer to Motorhead’s “Ace Of Spades.” This is rock with a capital “R,” heavy on the riffs and light on the flash, with Lindberg finding enough motivation in his nihilistic lyrics to counter each heavy gauged haymaker that guitarists Bjorn Peterson and Uffe Cederlund throw at him.
There’s little that translates into new territory, but there’s enough blatant testosterone swirling around each of Live The Storm’s ten tracks to not give a shit about it. These are men, old enough to know better yet aged to the point where they vividly remember the power of their influences and stick close to that proven formula.
With any luck, a few young pups will follow Disfear’s stringent blueprint and create a tsunami of their own.
MP3: Disfear - "Get It Off" (courtesy of fr0k)
MP3s from Misanthropic Generation:
• Disfear - "An Arrogant Breed"
• Disfear - "The Horns"
Comments