Sorcery - Arrival at Six

Sorcery
Arrival at Six
2013 Xtreem Music
The first thing that hits you on "Arrival at Six" is... well, the whole band.  There's no intro or lead-in.  Everyone, including vocalist Ola Malmström come right out of the gate with all guns blazing, phasers set to "kill," swords at the ready... you get the idea.  The second thing you notice is that the production is a lot more raw and in your face than you're used to hearing from Swedish death metal bands, especially these days.  As far as I'm concerned, the sound they got in the mix is a welcome change from the usual attempts of trying to recapture the style of Unisound or Sunlight Studios.  This was deliberate, and I was surprised to learn that the drums were actually recorded at Sunlight Studios, and the album was mixed there as well.  It's just so unlike what we're accustomed to hearing when it comes to the metal that comes out of there.  There's an incredible old-school feel here, and there's a damn good reason for that.  Sorcery aren't some new band trying to recreate the old glory days.  Sorcery were there at the beginning, and gave us an true classic in 1991's "Bloodchilling Tales."  If things had ended there, then they would have joined the same ranks as Authorize, Crematory (Sweden, not Germany!), Bloodstone, Mefisto and others. So full of promise but without that one critical break they needed to get to the next step.  Fast forward to the here and now.  Ola and Paul Johansson got back together, recruited John Falk (who was part of In Aeternum with Paul at one point) on drums, and one Mikael Carlsson on bass.  Since the recording of this album, Mikael has been replaced by Jacob Wibers (also in Sordid Flesh, who I hear have an album coming out soon).  A few demos were put together, and the end result was "Arrival at Six."  Sorcery still play the same kind of Swedish styled death metal they did in their original incarnation, and that leads me to the third thing that hits you with this album.  Ola's vocals are very understandable, in the same way as other guys who have been around for a while like Martin van Drunen, LG Petrov and Marc Grewe.  That's a real rarity these days where all we seem to hear are guys who are doing their level best to ruin themselves and are so gutteral, they might as well be singing the phone book.  Bottom line here is, we have a band that's going their own way, doing their music the way they want to, with the sound they want to, and not giving a damn about conforming to what anyone's idea of what an "old school" band is supposed to sound like.