Casket - Undead Soil (2013)

   Maybe the most interesting thing about early '90s German death metal bands is, that they always tried to experiment with the style in some way, but mostly without slipping out from its borders. And this seems to be the factor that most reviewers with "wide spectrum" at magazines and mainstream metal sites are missing from the genre, cause "we heard this 1000 times before". But despite the pretended endeavor to always discover something new and extraordinary, the early German death metal scene still remained barely recognized. Casket is one of the few bands of the scene, who didn't change style or disappeared completely since then. 

   And their third full-length album haven't been disappointing either, the same experimenting ambitions could be heard in their music, that have been long lost from the scene, and in a way how only early '90s bands did. On the side of the accurate understanding of the genre, they still sound somehow different from other death metal bands. That means operating with the toolbar of musical minimalism, but not necessarily the most common death metal riffs could be heard in their songs, and the song compositions could be also slightly different. Some with different sound and vocal style could perfectly fit into more popular genres, and that suspects wider influences than usual. The production and the sound are great, and like in this case, if everything goes well, not many would even notice at first that some basic but unusual style features have been embedded into the music. However, hearing a System of a Down cover on a death metal album is similarly irrelevant like a well known radio or pop song's death metalized version. If it meant to be a joke, not many fans are having a good laugh as it might have been expected, and if it meant to increase the hipster factor, it's not really the right place to go after such things (try black metal then). And in both cases it tells about the lack of imagination, and that's quite a paradox if it's about a continuously experimenting band. But except this false step, "Undead Soil" is an enjoyable unusual old school death metal album for the fans of the early '90s extreme scene.