Wombbath - Internal Caustic Torments (1993)

   Wombbath was one of the lesser known old school death metal bands from Sweden, partly because of their name was lost among their lots of local coateniouses. Despite even if their name is spelled accurately, it is nearly inevitable for a cute marsupial mammal to come into mind. And second, because their music didn't follow the well known recipe of Swedish death metal. 
   The "Swedish buzzsaw" sound was completely missing from "Internal Caustic Torments", but the features of the local scene are easy to identify in the themes. However the music sounds more Morbid Angel inspired, and not only because of the very familiar riffs that could be heard on the album, but the complexity of the songs also strongly reminding to early Morbid Angel. This level of technicality wasn't so usual in the Swedish scene. There have been a few exceptions who didn't desire even nearly to sound like local bands (like Tiamat or Ceremonial Oath), but those bands changed style soon. However, in similar cases the results were not even close to keep up in the brutality competition of the early '90s, therefore if the different sound wasn't the part or the starting steps of some wider imagination, like if the whole thing didn't lead to another path by a style change, the distinguishable features didn't spark much attention. Anyways, Wombbath's first full-length album still became a classic afterall, and its "daring to be different" attitude was placed into a more advantageous perspective as time have passed.