Afflicted Convulsion (Swe) - "Beyond Redemption" demo, 1990

Sweden had one of the most prominent and best death metal scenes in the late 80s and early 90s. While a little slow to start off, it seems that after Nihilist released their seminal demos in 1988 and 1989, literally dozens of bands popped up all across the country in the next couple years. The sheer amount of bands trying to recapture the Nihilist/Entombed sound certainly put some people off; when I started getting into this kind of music in the mid 1990s, the black metal backlash was still in full swing. Many reviews from this time referred to albums like Darkthrone's "Soulside Journey" as being trendy garbage, death metal as life affirming hippie music, and black metal as being an true uncompromising anti-trend music. Its interesting how this mentality in itself forms a trend, evidenced by the extremely fast stagnation of the black metal genre in the late 90s, going from what was a very vibrant and promising scene with landmark releases across the globe to a large parody of itself in less than half a decade's time.

Coming back to Sweden, while a mass amount of death metal bands formed there in the late 80s, not all of them went for the Entombed buzzsaw guitar and riff heavy approach. Afflicted Convulsion in particular played a form of very heavy and detuned death metal that in approach almost bears similarities to contemporary grindcore works; their second demo was called "Psychadelic Grindcore", and while this rather tongue-in-cheek title hints at the bands sense of humor (possibilty in addition to the cool three dimensional "Afflicted" in the logo juxtaposed on top of the more death metal font "Convulsion"), it at least gives a good glimpse into where they band was coming from at this point in time.

The "Beyond Redemption" demo, their third, reprises most of the tracks from the "Psychadelic Grindcore" demo and while it doesn't have any jamming or pointless meandering like the "psychadelic" aspect would imply, what it does have is a cavernous wall of sound production that is intensely heavy. This type of music bears a strong similarity to what Grave or Carnage were doing at the time, and considering the classic status of the early works of these two, this is certainly not a bad thing. The music tends to be rather fast-paced, occasionally breaking into more mid-tempo sections, vocals are low-pitched growls that are rather flat and basic, but enough to do the job. The song titles in particular are rather strange, particular "Utilization", which hint at an odd sense of humor on the band's part which tended to be prevalent in these acts.

This demo is a nearly flawless piece of heavy Swedish death metal, favoring a massive steamroller approach rather than a more visceral and raw attack on the listener. After this demo the band would drop the word "Convulsion" from their band name and released a couple of albums under the name of "Afflicted". These albums I found to be a huge disappointment, especially compared to how awesome this demo is. Over time I grew to appreciate their first LP, "Prodigal Sun" a little more on its own terms, but the "Beyond Redemption" demo simply remains one of the best recordings to come out of the early Swedish death metal scene, and easily blows away anything the band has done since.