SEVERE TORTURE, Sworn Vengeance (Earache, 2007)

The skull:
There’s so little to look at here, the attention is immediately drawn to the missing front tooth. Makes this person look a lot dumber than he/she probably was while living. The eye sockets are huge, as is the nasal hole. The skull has a slightly worried or fearful look, but maybe that’s just the imagination running wild after having to contemplate such a simplistic album cover design. Yet another tossed off “uh, how about a skull” sort of cover. Big and dumb, but even we here at BDS demand a little more imagination than this.

The music:
Faster than your usual Dutch death metal (which often has a lot of love for the slower paces of doom), and very U.S. sounding, which is probably exactly what they’re going for. Some similarities to countrymen Sinister, but even more generic. Well-played, no doubt, and doing absolutely nothing that hasn’t been done to death before. This would blow your ass away if you hadn’t already heard hundreds of death metal bands and thousands of death metal albums over the years. So, one for the new kids I suppose. Zzzzzz….
–Friar Wagner

Hey, any of these songs would have fit nicely on the classic Grind Crusher compilation, so at least it fits under the label’s general umbrella.