INHERITANCE

Witherscape's 'The Inheritance', released in 2013, is the debut album from the two-piece Swedish extreme metal band, and is the latest in a long line of musical projects from Dan Swano, a musician known for his ground-breaking work with Edge Of Sanity and Nightingale, amongst others. As alluded to in both of my previous 'Crimson' reviews, Swano is a firm favourite of mine. He is an extremely skilled multi-instrumentalist, superb metal vocalist and amazing progressive composer who is able to merge a wide variety of rock and metal styles into cohesive and highly enjoyable compositions.

In this album Dan Swano plays drums, keyboards and provides the vocals. He is joined by guitarist Ragner Widerberg, who proves to be one of the surprise revelations on this album. For Widerberg this is his first studio album, but you'd never know it - he is an absolutely fantastic guitar player and has a wonderful playing style!

So what about the music then? I'd best describe 'The Inheritance' as a merging between the gothic progressive rock style found in Nightingale albums with the hard edge extreme metal from Edge Of Sanity as found on their 'Crimson II' album. The results are spectacular. There are highly melodic technical death metal riffs, brutal metal vocals but also some truly heartfelt clean vocal passages with beautiful acoustic music.

However, in a lot of ways the music on offer in 'The Inheritance' isn't all that ground-breaking, considering the year in which it was released. There are a lot of extreme metal bands combining musical styles these days. But in my opinion this album does more than enough to stand out against the crowd. 'The Inheritance' is very well composed, the riffs are highly memorable and there is enough variation throughout to hold your attention for the 40-minute running time.

There are some real progressive highlights on this album, in particular the track 'Dying For The Sun', which has a rather unusual muted acoustic guitar intro and very soft style before launching into probably the best metal riff on the album with an almost Rage Against The Machine style to it - highly rhythmic and funky! This song continues to progress through musical styles and to hear its growth is highly enjoyable. The keyboard section in this song is a great deal of fun, especially when Swano lays some death metal vocals over the top of it.

There are also more straight-forward moments on this album - I wouldn't classify this as an entirely progressive release but it does more than enough to warrant inclusion on the archives and might be one of the best extreme prog-metal albums from 2013. Recommended for fans of the style, 4-stars.