CROWPATH - Red On Chrome CD

Born and raised in a country whose metal bands shamelessly shoplift enough Iron Maiden to warrant musical plagiarism suits to be filed, Sweden's Crowpath outshine the hamfisted hordes of hackneyed copycats with their debut masterpiece of abrasive anti-melody, Red On Chrome. The 13-track, 30-minute mammoth was recorded by Fredrik Reinedahl (In Flames, Burst, Gadget, Dimension Zero) and wields an absolute air of clarity and nucklebusting crunch rarely heard in a time of tin can production values. Fusing the drunken, staggered grooves of latter-day Coalesce with Immolation's trance-inducing sense of rhythm and dynamics, Crowpath triumphs in carving out an album that extracts the most violent, technically-obsessed aspects from modern death metal and intrinsically filters them through the urgent unpredictability of grindcore.