CROWPATH

Easy on the ears this is not. The music of Sweden's CROWPATH has never been confused with "Sounds of the Rain Forest". The band's nerve wracking ways continue on new full-length, "One with Filth", ensuring that followers will still experience befuddlement over attempts to accurately describe the extreme metal tremors that emanate from it.

"One with Filth" is the type of album that knocks you back on your heels before you are able to regain equilibrium and begin appreciating the finer details of the aural overload. CROWPATH takes equal parts grind, sludge, and death metal, dumps them into a blender, and presses "purée." Nothing ever feels like a certainty and no matter how stable a particular song segment may seem you just know that an eruption is always around the corner. The parched throat growls and screams, as well as the coarse riffing, are part and parcel to the creation of a foreboding atmosphere that seems to blanket the recording like soot.

And yet through the calamity, you will occasionally hear a surprisingly effective, not quite melodic (but getting close),lick that causes you to pause for thought, such as the cascading riff that precedes the utter chaos of the title track. Then there is the sludgy and loping riff/tempo on the strangely titled "Where Dolls do Sin", as well as the droning instrumental "I Gryningen" that serves as an ominous reprieve before the shrapnel begins flying again on "Cleansed in Chlorine". The drumbeat/feedback march of short instrumental "Retarded Angel" brings the album to a close, as images of smoke drifting over scorched earth fill the mind.

On "One with Filth", CROWPATH skillfully picks its atrocities and groups them in a way that is unquestionably ruinous, yet oddly cohesive. The Swedes never take it easy on the listener; that's for sure. "One with Filth" is further proof of it.