Terrortory
The Seed Left Behind

The seed left behind, that is what they call their debut album, Swedish band Terrortory from the northern regions of the nation. An album that seems to evoke the will to count lots of band names, and mainly those who were pioneering the so-called gothenburg death metal. Maybe they are invoking some nostalgic view from those who were taken by the melodic death metal from the Gothenburg area in the 90s, a reviewer on some Swedish site was slightly into that line of reasoning, the site was annoying though wanting me to buy advertising which I don’t want. In press information there is almost as much of a stapling of clichés as fat people staple junk food on their tables, which is a lot. I found it quite difficult to pick out facts that weren’t just superlatives and sales talk in that information, but the fact is that the band was formed as far back as 2000 and only now releasing their debut album, lazy. The cover art is said to be hand painting, as opposed to foot- or mouth painted I guess, much like foot walking is the preferred way of walking in the dense forest around the band’s home town Skellefteå. I think what the label means is that the artwork is a traditional painting as opposed to something airbrushed as is often the case with album covers today. Anyway, lots of stuff to be said there but I think it might be a bit boring to go on so lets look at what kind of musical adventure we can expect instead.

Melodic death metal with a rather groovy and catchy sound is what my description has to be like. The vocals are quite varied from clean to many different kinds of growly, the songs have a decent variation over the 40 minutes the album plays. Sure it isn’t the most groundbreaking band out there, their music seems quite ordinary but with a slight own touch in its grooviness. Also it can at first glance seem rather flat and monotonous, it took me a few times to get to the description that I have written and if I had only listened once or twice I would had said it lacked variation and flat. So I would say that it is an album that requires some time to get to know and when you do it has more variation than you might think.

I think this album is good, not as the reviewer I referred to before who said that the world didn’t need another melodic death metal album. Which of course is true, neither do the world need music, computers or humans and I don’t see anyone getting rid of those, music is not necessary but it can still be a good experience and I do think this album is a very good one. It has good catchy melodies, the differentiated vocals and energy are all very positive elements of this album. And I do not think it is worse than the early In Flames or whatever other band you want to mention from back then, they have an angle that is hardly groundbreaking but it still feels fresh when made by Terrortory and maybe the long time has been positive in order to make the album as good as it is. But I was at the first two or three listens polishing my bashings of this album, but fortunately we give albums more time and that opinion has been completely turned around.

The album starts in a fascinating way with a very calm and somewhat beautiful piano piece that breaks into a very heavy first song, which is followed by a good collection of songs. I will not pick a song as favourite, I think it strength is as a whole and the short playing time is clever as well because that keeps the feel of variation through the entire album. That makes this into a very good album and here I agree with most other reviewers that it is a good and recommended album. Sure it does not contribute with anything the world need but how much of our human civilisation does that? That’s right, absolutely nothing, we are a useless species that does not offer anything good for our planet anyway so contrary to what some idiot reviewer say, this album definitely deserves to be looked at. There is a seed from it left behind.