TOMBSTALKER - Chaos Monolith

Man, I’ve really picked some great albums to write about. Seriously, I don’t know what I’d do with myself without death metal. :)

TOMBSTALKER’s Chaos Monolith is a record that stands out for its versatility from the very first minutes. OSDM, black metal, war metal, the Gothenburg sound and the Stockholm sound all run through its veins at once. Yet this variety never turns the album into a record that gets thrown from one direction to another; quite the opposite, all these influences come together around a rock-solid death metal backbone.

The Entombed influence is particularly pronounced on the first two tracks, Chaos Monolith and Inexorable Slaughter. That dirty, rusty, growling guitar character of the early Stockholm sound is unmistakable here. The third track, Fully Armed and Filthy, shifts the needle toward black/thrash and suddenly reveals another side of the album. On the fourth track, Unto the Anvil of War, the Bolt Thrower influence kicks in; the level of sheer heaviness reaches a point where you feel like you’ve been run over by a truck. The tremolo-picked guitars and distinct Dismember feel on the fifth track, Warp Storm Imminent, bring the album’s Swedish vein back to the forefront.

The guitars practically growl; while the bass guitar makes the filth even heavier with its thick strings, the shifts between death metal and black metal keep pulling the album’s atmosphere toward a graveyard. With the dominance of D-beat, bursts that collide with tremolo guitars and occasional doom/death weight, Chaos Monolith gradually starts crushing you harder and harder.

“Penitent Engine” is one of the finest examples of this atmosphere. An ominous track, it deepens the album’s darkness with tasteful, atmospheric keyboard touches woven into its harsh framework. Rather than stepping in front of the music, the keyboards lurk in the background, giving the track an unsettling atmosphere that makes you feel like you’ve been left alone in a graveyard.

TOMBSTALKER has taken the early Stockholm sound, particularly the Dismember and Entombed lineage, and shaped it into something fuller and heavier. A raw graveyard atmosphere hangs over the entire album. The guitar harmonies and those creeping grooves create a weight that bears down on you. And the album doesn’t do this all at once; it increases the level of violence gradually, like slowly turning up the volume knob. As the D-beats and doom-tinged sections kick in, the weight increases, and the album begins to make its power felt more and more.

When Bolt Thrower’s crushing weight comes into play, the dynamics rise to an entirely different level. The truck has now been replaced by a Panzer. The riffs become more mechanical, heavier and more destructive. What TOMBSTALKER is doing isn’t really reinventing some retro death metal formula; it’s taking that formula in skilled hands and driving it forward through different shapes. The result is a record that doesn’t lean on nostalgia, but instead carries all the filthy and aggressive character of old-school death metal into the present.

“Fully Armed and Filthy” in particular is a tremendous example of songwriting that shows just how effective the combination of black metal and thrash metal can be. It also sums up the album’s overall diversity extremely well: aggressive, fast, filthy and heavy when it needs to be.

Chaos Monolith isn’t an album chasing innovation. It doesn’t need to. It takes all the ammunition held by old-school death metal, black metal, thrash, crust and doom, loads it into a single tank and pulls the trigger. At that point, the most sensible thing to do is turn the volume up a little further and wait for that Panzer to roll right over you.

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