I’ve always considered Shadows In The Deep as the darkest and gloomiest album Unleashed ever released in their quite long career. The debut made them jump on the big swedish death metal train and now, just one year after, they are back with this album to annihilate us once again through really heavy and dark music. Unleashed has always been quite different from the other death metal bands from Sweden and especially from Grave, Entombed, Carnage and Dismember. These last bands all have a conductive line that binds them together: a sort of primordial brutality bind to a certain swedish death metal standard, with massive, chainsaw guitars and different patterns.
Unleashed is a band that was heavily influenced by punk music and partially by the thrash metal and the traditional metal in the structures, the riffs and the sounds. Everything sounds a bit less morbid, gore and less distorted if we want and if we compare this band to the ones I cited before. By the way, let’s enter this album to see how it is. “The Final Silence” is more than representative for its sudden explosion through up tempo parts and a screamed beginning. The vocals are nasty and really malevolent and the music follows. The doom moments are dark and really well-done with long notes and some heavier riffs.
The production is glacial, bleak and dark. All the instruments are really cold and essential in their distortion. The guitar sound is not excessive in volumes but absolutely low-tuned in its more classical and less distorted production. It’s essential but extremely gloom and the drums are on the same style with essential approach and sounds. Everything seems bare-bone and conceived to transmit a sense of suffocation and darkness. The mid-paced progression of “The Immortals” is symptomatic of this quest for dark passages and doom moments, while with “A Life Beyond” we return to faster patterns. The tremolo picking style on the guitars is cold and massive like a black monolith.
During the up tempo parts we can notice that certain punk attitude in playing even if we are in death metal. The title track is not excellent because features the same three riffs on mid-paced progression and after awhile it’s a bit boring, but we find the good cover “Countess Bathory” to increase in intensity. “Neverending Hate” is full of up tempo parts and it’s among the most impulsive outputs here. “Onwards into Countless Battles” is full of those galloping riffs that are a true characteristic of the Unleashed sound. This is where the thrash metal influences come out and a hint of epic style is required also. This track shows also a new conception for lyrics, now more based on the Vikings era and their wars.
“Crush the Skull” is another song that takes no prisoners for its fury. All the instruments are charged and ready to explode. By the way, we can always fall into some more mid-paced moments in these songs, so they are not “one way” and that is good. There are some solos too, to fill this sound and they are done properly. “Bloodbath” is a slow, massive march of the North Hordes with lots of doomy parts and long notes. The last “Land Of Ice” displays more canonical swedish death metal parts with violent progressions and fast riffs. It’s a perfect song to finish this album.
Overall, this Shadows In The Deep remains on good levels and presented us a band in shape. The aggression of the fastest parts is always well-balanced with the unmistakable doom moments and the mid-paced stops. This is another good effort for them.
rafazardly 