The Grotesquery - Tales of the Coffin Born (2010)

   The Gotesquery was formed as band with strictly classic horror based concept, that might not sound surprising from an old school death metal band, but their orientation was very determined and they payed attention on the details of the selected concept way more than others did. 
   That means direct references to iconic authors of the genre like E.A. Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. The interesting thing was that the band managed to make "Tales of the Coffin Born" as a concept album, even though it was built from different sources. The album tells a story about a father, who wants to keep his undead born morbid child alive with human sacrifices. On the side of the song lyrics the story telling gets completeted narratively by an artificially distorted voice at the beginning of each song. The solution of borrowing different story lines and quotes to create one story seems simple, such as the distorted narrative voice, but it's working however, and got close to the spirit of classic horror novels as it's possible. By uniting big and well know names of death metal such as Kam Lee and Rogga Johansson, it's easy to predict the musical background. Swedish styled old school death metal with the easily recognizable characteristic vocal style of Kam Lee. The music also shows the mixed features of old school Swedish and American death metal, since the sound doesn't follow the usual Swedish sound so strictly, and the band tried to write more diverse and melodic themes. Mainly the idea of a concept album made "Tales of the Coffin Born" interesting, but at the other hand similar to any other cases when big names are teaming up, the music is always reaching the expectations, but doesn't offer anything extraordinary.