MALFEITOR, To Hell, Farewell (2011, Till You Fukkin Bleed)

The skull:
This guy barely qualifies for inclusion into the Skullection, as he’s not quite transformed from flesh to bone, but we’re giving him a pass. He’s clearly going through something pretty uncomfortable and his plight deserves recognition. We empathize with the fact that he’s dying from an overdose of moldy Ramen, which surge from his eye sockets and mouth. Probably a college kid whose wild night went a little too wild. He stumbled back to his dorm, warmed up the hot pot, and that’s when all hell broke loose. (The impaling stake probably hurts a little bit too.) Those circling vultures can’t wait to get a piece of this delicacy.

The music:
Consisting of members of Blood Mortized, Godhate and Excruciate, one can expect exactly what such a pedrigree portends: adequate but hardly innovative Swedish death metal. It is, in fact, too many generations removed from the original root to be all that impressive. Each of the demo’s six songs serve up typical Swedish brutality, complete with super-fat guitar tone, forbidding vocal bellows and a variety of tempo shifts. The solo/musical section before the last verse/chorus of “Beyond the Horrorizon” is seriously impressive, but other than that it’s pretty much par for the course. And, despite the obvious talents of each member, “adequate” or “par for the course” won’t be good enough to leap over the very high bar death metal’s best have set for the genre. Maybe a Tribulation or Morbus Chron-esque evolution is in their future, but I doubt it.
— Friar Wagner