A Forgotten Mid-90s Swedish Metal Gem – 80%
MaskedHorror, October 6th, 2020
Someone rated this a 1%? Seems rather low for what we’ve got here.
And, what we’ve got here in Man Against is the sort of mid-paced early- to mid-90s thing that various Swedish bands were starting to experiment with once they got over their melodic Hellhammer-meets-Venom imitation phase: sort of like the early ’90s melodic gothic-doom of Tiamat and Cemetary, with a dash of the “death-and-roll” of Entombed and Xysma of the era, sprinkled with a bit of the weirdness of Disharmonic Orchestra, with hints of the groove metal that would have been popular in the later part of the decade (it’s not entirely unlike an eccentric cross between Tiamat’s Clouds, Cemetary’s Godless Beauty, and Sepultura’s Chaos A.D.) Expect a consistent, polished and very European mix of chuggy/groovy bass-heavy riffs, mid-paced drums, grunted vocals, melodic heavy rock guitars, moody acoustic passages, and bluesy electric leads, with forgettable angsty lyrics about standing up to a vaguely-defined oppression (typical of any random song from the album: “Tie me up and kick me down / Still it’s somebody’s fault but mine / So, it isn’t about right or wrong / But it sure is about time”).
Sure, we’ve heard a lot of this before, and Expulsion might not have been quite as charismatic and memorable as some of the bands this album might be compared to, but the riffs aren’t bad, the musicianship seems competent enough, and the songwriting is at worst inoffensive, if a bit slow-paced compared to the average grindcore-inspired Swedish melodic death metal that would have been more popular a few years before this was written, and the Norwegian black metal fad that would have just been getting popular by the mid-90’s.
Obviously, this is not an important or genre-busting album that ever had a chance of catching on in 1997, with most of the music this might best be compared with having come and gone about five years earlier before metal moved on to other things, and with the late ’90s metal apocalypse looming ahead, in which an oversaturated and overexposed genre had to shed a lot of superfluous bands and do something new to compete with grunge, industrial, and punk for mainstream listeners, and its underground fans were finding far more exciting and ground-breaking fare in Norwegian black metal and other more extreme subgenres: Man Against was an album released a few years too late to really leave any sort of impression in the context of its time.
Still, this isn’t bad for also-ran Swedish gothic-doom and death-and-roll, in a mix of subgenres that was never really overplayed, and in retrospect makes an interesting and largely forgotten curiosity in the collection of fans of the earlier and mid-era work of northern European bands like Tiamat (Expulsion is, in fact, a spin-off of early Tiamat, formed by the guitarist and drummer from that band’s Treblinka-era demos), Cemetary, Xysma, Convulse, Disharmonic Orchestra, and the like. In that light, some of the more memorable songs here that would mix well with a playlist of that sort of thing include moodier songs like “Burning Down the Empire”, “These are Not the Times for the Innocent”, “Theme from the End of Time”, “The Grief in Me”, and the energetic “Minus”….
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