Band: Mr Death
Title: Descending Through Ashes
Label: Agonia Records
Distribution: Bertus
Release date: September 25th 2011 (Europe) / October 25th 2011 (North America)
Review: CD

Agonia and Mr Death, it’s a marriage that seems to work for / since quite a while. The band was formed in 2007 and all previous officially recorded stuff has been issued through our beloved agionars. With former stuff I’m referring to Detached From Life (full length 2008) and Death Suits You (mini-album 2009), which I did like a lot, both of them (especially the first one, as a matter of fact, for Death … sounded somewhat too repeating, unfortunately). I had Concreteweb’s honour to review both of them – the last one still at your service on November 15th 2010’s update.
The members’ experiences in the past – and I am talking about a ‘huge’ past: Treblinka / Tiamat and Expulsion / River’s Edge – do colour Mr Death’s style a lot; it was the case in the past and it still goes that way – why changing a winning team, not?! Hell-and-Heaven yeah, Descending Through Ashes does not differ profoundly in its core from the past. …luckily, praise the Horned One for this sweet continuation of Utter Primitivism! But one cannot ignore the evolution within the band’s majesty and creativity.
The album lasts for thirty four minutes (too short, unfortunately!) and what strikes is the increased intensification, the deeper, much more profound and abyssal sound. Still the ‘roots’ play a head role, meaning that the origins of the Swedish Old School are maintained – luckily. Yet Mr Death did choose an obscured direction this time.
Tracks like The Plague And The World It Made, the title track or Another State Of Decay are strongly comparable to the members’ earliest bands (Treblinka, very early Tiamat and Expulsion especially) and related acts like (early) Grave, Nihilist / (very early) Entombed, Utumno, Morbid or Dismember. Because the sound is massive (don’t forget this stuff has been recorded (more than) twenty years after the bands mentioned before), it overpowers those ‘originals’ a little, and the performance and song writing have bettered a lot too, of course – experience shows, you see! But a sure progression is the addition of gargantuan epic melodies; Your Final Demise, for example, comes with warlike hints of Unleashed and Amon Amarth as well. And of course several tracks include very slow, slightly Doom-injected excerpts too, which do contrast nicely with the mid- to up-tempo speed and the several semi-blasting implosions and explosions. In a way, and in spite of the one-directional approach, Descending Through Ashes is the most unhappy Mr Death-recording to date in many aspects, especially when it comes to mercy or forgiveness. …’cause don’t expect any…
FYI: recorded and mixed by Karl Daniel Lindén (Switchblade, Dozer, Digression Assassins) and mastered as West West Music by Alan Douches (Aeon, Nile, Aborted, Hate Eternal, Nameless Crime, Cannibal Corpse and many, many more).

85/100

Ivan Tibos.