Album Review: Bastard Grave – “What Lies Beyond”

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Somewhere between the buzzsaw guitar grind of vintage Entombed and the murk of the modern American underground’s best up-and-comers like Baptists and Call of The Void, you’ll find Sweden’s Bastard Grave. The group’s new full-length, Pulverised Records’ What Lies Beyond, is a dripping mud pit of frantic riffs and horror aesthetic that sounds just as much at home on a playlist with old school death metal as with the latest blackened thrash. According to Bastard Grave’s press release, prior to What Lies Beyond, the band only had one demo to their name, which makes the debut effort all the more impressive. Sitting down to spin this album and knowing that this was the band’s first full-length, I expected a more scattered affair. Pleasantly surprised to find out how wrong I was; What Lies Beyond features an array of songs uniting under the clarity of one solid vision. Continue reading