False Prophecies’ biggest flaw is that it’s dropped just a few months after Gruesome, Exhumed frontman Matt Harvey’s equally reverential love letter to classic Death.
Undead are also beholden to the tiring gimmick of having an anonymous lineup draped in robes “so people can focus solely on the music”.
This being said, you’ll quickly realise that these grim reapers also rank Martin van Drunen-era Pestilence and early Morgoth highly, both established acts that proved you could be Leprosy devotees yet come up with a sound on your own. Actually, while the whole point of Gruesome is to come as close as possible to its model, here it serves more like a stepping stone to reach darker and more atmospheric territories depicted by a lyrical content more focused on the left-hand path than on screaming bloody gore. False Prophecies, then, may be an old-school death metal record with a huge debt to pay off, but it’s a good one – and with enough promise to keep listeners intrigued about where it’ll lead us next.
