Having not been familiar with Sweden’s This Ending I was quite surprised when I listened to there third full length release Garden of Death.  This Ending features members of the group A Canorous Quintet and also former drummer of Amon Amarth Fredrik Andersson.  I had to go back and listen to their 2009 effort Dead Harvest to kind of get a sense of which direction this group has gone.  While Dead Harvest seemed to be more of a push towards a different style of sound maybe more industrial or metalcorish Garden of Death brings this back to a more traditional Swedish melodic death style that is actually pretty well played and fun to listen to.

“Torrent of Souls” opens up this forty-minute melodic death full length and build quite nicely and with driving double kick and textbook harmonies.  These guys are definitely not reinventing the wheel here but are quite competent in putting together some hooky tunes. “Blackened Shrine” is to me the strongest tune on here.  It is very difficult to not make an At The Gates comparison especially in terms of the way the riffs are arranged and played and also Martin Hansen’s vocal work has a similar cadence to Tomas Lindberg.

To me this album plays like a guilty pleasure, as I love melodic death.  From what I can tell these guys experimented on their first few releases playing out of their playing style. Garden of Death sounds to me like a classic mid nineties melodic Swedish death metal record and definitely reminds me of A Canorous Quintet. I can definitely tell that these guys tried some different things out on their first few releases and then decided to go back to what they were comfortable with. I am glad they did.  If you were a fan on anything that came out on No Fashion Records back in the day then this should be right up your alley. If you passed these guys off before give them a try again. You may be quite surprised.

 

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