With an band moniker that’s a homage to Gorement and their classic 1994 album, The Ending Quest, you know exactly what Sweden’s Ending Quest is delivering on their debut; HM-2 styled, mid range, old school Swedish death metal goodness. And in a year that has delivered some really top notch examples of the style (Brutally Deceased, Putereaon, and upcoming Horrendous, Unwilling Flesh, Just Before Dawn, etc) , Summoning holds up with the best of them.

As with all of the bands playing this style, it’s not about reinventing the wheel, but rather delivering homages to a classic sound, and Summoning is pure Left Hand Path/ Like an Ever Flowing Stream /You’ll Never See...worship. Despite the band’s name, this isn’t a more doomy moody take as you’d expect, though there is some atmospherics here and there that harken to Gorement and God Macabre. This is more about galloping riffs, crawling, murky melodies and that oh so sweet guitar tone, a tone that’s not overdone or forced and certainly an honest, real nod to the classics rather than a more processed louder, modern take on it.

Some old school keyboards are scattered around, cementing the 90s homage as heard in opener “Black Death”,  and “Evocation of Carnal Flesh”  and some of these moments along with the wailing/haunting solos (i.e “Voice”) reminded me of Cemetery’s underrated An Evil Shade of Grey, and this is one of the first revival albums to to so. But for the most part, this is all about riffs and more riffs that along with the deep, throaty dusty bellows  recall the aforementioned bands and albums . The likes of “Sumerian Invocation”, “Eradicate”, “Evocation of Carnal Flesh” and “Exalted and Fireborn” buzz and canter with catchy raging restraint and a real grasp of the genre’s dynamics, not just the guitar tone. Which makes sense as the trio started as as mid range cover band for a number of years and serve in old school death metal band Desolator.

Though not a game changer,  Summoning is a lot like Unwilling Flesh‘s upcoming Between the Living and the Dead in that it does everything perfectly in mid range Swedish homage homage and is a thoroughly enjoyable nostalgic trip down memory lane, in Stockholm.

[Visit the band's website]

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