First things first: love the name! Normally, when bands start combining and mashing up words for monikers and album titles, it screams of uncreative minds, produces hokey results and screams the desperate scream of those trying to position themselves as ‘troo’ and/or ‘kvlt.’
Second things second: not so enthralled with the title. Not because I took issue with what they choose to christen this record, but more because keywords like “interstellar,” “knowledge,” “purple” and “entity” jammed together with the help of a couple articles initially had me anticipating something much more on a space age tip as opposed to the yellow-and-blue (Swedish) death metal with a bleu-blanc-et-rouge (French) twist, however slight that twist may be, Skelethal regurgitate with this EP. And yes, as a matter of fact, I will often blindly throw on a band I haven't previously heard, or heard of, without researching their history beforehand, without checking out shitty sound clips and without tracking down photos of them to see what cool-guy shirts they’re wearing before diving into the main course. It’s called the element of surprise; try it sometime. It’s fun. Plus, you can submit yourself to all the stuff a band wants you to know at any point after you’ve figured out what, if anything, they’re saying to your gut from the off.
Anyhoot, this is the duo’s third official release (they’ve yet to make the leap into the realm of the full-length) and it’s comprised of three original tracks, a throwaway intro and a cover of Carnage’s “Torn Apart” in case you weren’t already convinced of their influences. Playing Swedish death metal probably sounds lickety-split and simple to the untrained ear. You’ve got your galloping riffs, your HM-2 pedal (or reasonable facsimile), your punky/peppy one-two drum beats and some leather-lunged nutjob growling out a mongoloid mating call and there you have it. But, we all know it’s not as simple as that archetypal dipshit beardo hanging out in your local coffee shop and ironically sporting an Iron Maiden shirt might think. The stunning collection of cut-rate Swe-death detritus clogging up the pipes originally laid by Entombed, Dismember, Unleashed and, yes, Carnage is working indication that it’s not as easy as forming a band with your roomie after hearing the Nihilist demos and skimming through Daniel Ekeroth’s Swedish Death Metal book.
Skelethal show themselves to be somewhere in the middle of this divide as they exhibit tendencies of both really awesome and awesomely average, sometimes in the course of a single song. “Slaughtered from Beyond” is a primo example; the intro and main riffs are extracted straight from the souls of Left Hand Path and Dark Recollections, but there are various slow downs in the forms of blase middle eights and riffs that just don’t cut the mustard. The title track starts with good amounts of whammy bar chaos and ominous axe-swinging monoliths, not to mention the furious galloping riff that takes over ‘round about the halfway point, but there are also long sequences where Gui Haunting’s guitar and vocals are struggling to maintain pace with Jon Whiplash’s wavering tempos resulting in sections of confusion reminiscent of Sodom’s Obsessed by Cruelty. But hey, that slab of sloppy vinyl has become a recognised classic in most circles. You never know what metal’s general listener-ship will cotton on to and there’s definite enough good for people to latch onto with Interstellar Knowledge of the Purple Entity.
7/10
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