Even if the Swedeath scene is now close to saturation, Bombs Of Hades still stand out for one sole reason: their guitarist, singer and main songwriter, Jonas Ståhlhammar. The man has had many musical lives over the past 25 years, from pioneering the genre with God Macabre to post-rock lushness with the UK’s Crippled Black Phoenix, he knows the value of a good chorus.
So even at its most primal, like the two-minute-long outburst that is Tombsday, Death Mask Replica remains to-the-point and catchy. Besides, if there’s something this one-time The Crown frontman loves even more than cranking up his HM-2 pedal to the max, Giallo movie soundtracks and sneaking various nods towards classic rock (Long May You Rot referring to Neil Young’s Long May You Run), it’s the mellotron. So when he’s not stepping on Entombed circa Wolverine Blues, he’s using it to embark on a seven-minute doomy trip (Burning Angel) through Hammer productions’ darkest corridors where he summons Goblin through a death-metal filter.
