(Today we present DGR‘s review of Grand Cadaver‘s new EP The Rot Beneath, which will be out on August 15th via Majestic Mountain Records.)
When you’re spread among many projects in the way Dark Tranquillity‘s Mikael Stanne has been over the past few years, there is a chance of one of them going consistently underrated in the face of all the other material being put out. The throwback riffwork of swede-death project Grand Cadaver has flown under the radar among many in metal fandom, and it has reached a point where you can’t help but wonder if people are unintentionally robbing themselves of an awesome time by just breezing past the group and chalking them up as another band pining for older days.
Grand Cadaver have proven to be a rock-solid foundation of music since their founding in 2020; the five years since have seen the group chalking up an array of singles, EPs, and two full albums to their name, all of which, yes, look backward in order to progress forward, and have either been stealthily melodic or pushed at the boundaries of floor-stomping death metal enough to keep the events interesting.
Photo Credit: Peter Trones
Grand Cadaver could easily get by on monumentally stupid swede-death riffs for an album or two, yet choose not to. Instead they embark on an equally delicate dance on a packed venn-diagram that could have had the band unwittingly stumbling into Dark Tranquillity territory, yet have never done that either. There’s melodic death metal as a genre and there’s death metal with a lot of melody to it and Grand Cadaver are having a grand time sailing between the two.
The group’s newest EP The Rot Beneath is another four songs of rollicking death metal that will do nothing to turn people away from that idea, instead melding what is tried and true with a slightly more vicious taste for the straightforward. The Rot Beneath clocks in at around fourteen minutes of non-stop headbanging that once again adheres to the pattern of sneakily being something far more than just brain-dead chainsaw riffwork and a constant drum-kit assault.
That said, this is still death metal at its core, so there is a degree to which one must shut their brain off in order to fully wrap themselves around what is happening here. This is music that is far more caveman oriented than the higher thought processes, and even the album art doesn’t exactly suggest a place of deep profundity when it comes to overall subject matter. Grand Cadaver are going to be aiming for the throat on every song, and if previous experience is to be any sort of guide they’ll have gotten particularly good at that part of the equation by now.
Opener “Blood-Red Banner” is partial adrenaline rush, partial anthem, and pulling from a favored bag of tricks in just starting the song off from the word GO. “Blood-Red Banner” is a classic in that sense, starting from moment one with no build up and the band effectively at one hundred percent to start. You’d think by now, with decades’ long metal-fandom under one’s belt, that having the band launch into a song in the same way one might be drunkenly heave-hoed over the side of a cliff would stop working, but that immediate injection of energy kicks the events of The Rot Beneath off to a very strong start.
A good point of this EP is that Grand Cadaver also put in a lot of groundwork to keep that energy high across all of the songs here; the temptation to drop into a mid-tempo skull-stomper is always ever-present, but whatever got into Grand Cadaver during the sessions for The Rot Beneath never allows them to do so. They hew pretty close to the anthemic repetition of the song title in every song though, so you can’t help but notice how both “Blood-Red Banner” and “The Rot Beneath” are built around the same four syllables designed to punch into your skull, even marching to a similar cadence.
“Endless Dead” is where the impression of Grand Cadaver not wanting to let off the accellerator for The Rot Beneath is sealed in stone. “Endless Dead” is the battle-soundtrack song, with an opening of double bass pedal gallop likely to send any crowd into a whirling frenzy. If Grand Cadaver were comfy with ripping through all four of the songs on The Rot Beneath during a set they’d likely just have an endless circle pit anyway, but “Endless Dead” is particularly designed for such a purpose.
The drum beat trotted out during the “One step forward! Six feet down!” segment that rips its way into the song’s second verse has to be one of the more blatant “headbang you moron!” segments in a death metal song in some time, which only cedes its way to a fun guitar effect and melodic work for the bridge that breaks Grand Cadaver out of the reputation of just being a parrot for the boulder-stupid. There’s a few moments like that in every song on The Rot Beneath and it is something that has become a calling card for them dating back to Into The Maw Of Death. Even at their most brutality-focused, Grand Cadaver are going to always have something more on offer.
If you’re one of the cool kids in the know you likely caught that we premiered the song “Darkened Apathy” when Grand Cadaver put the music video out for it, so we can just refer people to that post if you would like a tremendous deep dive into the heart of that song. It’s the one segment of this EP wherein Grand Cadaver do slow down for a bit — but not by much. It is auditory desolation in its approach, as Grand Cadaver aim to conjure images of scarred Earth and empty planet. During its slower segments it is near mournful, and the death metal hammering that follows is piston-fired in its accuracy and heaviness.
The Rot Beneath is a hell of an enjoyable ride. Grand Cadaver have yet to really misfire, and maybe it’s that the band existing as a steady undercurrent in the world of death metal has kept them perpetually hungry. They can’t help but come out snarling any time someone opens the gates for them yet they never devolve completely into missing evolutionary link territory. Grand Cadaver keep up their reputation for being both relentless and also stealthily melodic as well, blurring the line wherever they can without ever letting go of the idea of their music as a blade to attack with. They are well-practiced in the comfort zone of death metal but they’ll leave it if they can find new sonic barriers to poke and prod against, only to dive headfirst back into warmer waters to ensure that both blood and mosh flow in equal measure.
The Rot Beneath is promising for the band’s future, and if they stick to the “EP foreshadowing the future Album cycle” that they’ve used for themselves before — much like Vader has, interestingly — then the eventual full-length is going to be a gnarly beast to have to go toe-to-toe with.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.majesticmountainrecords.com/products/grand-cadaver-the-rot-beneath-pre-order
GRAND CADAVER:
https://grandcadaver.com
https://www.facebook.com/grandcadaver
https://www.instagram.com/grandcadaver
https://grandcadaver.bandcamp.com