PURGATORY AFTERGLOW

Death metal that grooves, that holds back and bursts out, death metal that is both melodic and brutal. In 1994 this was still exceptional in a genre that lived by play-fast, grunt & die young standards. This 4th album from EOS offers quite a lot of surprises: advanced song writing, melody, instrumentation, a very powerful production, some singing and evidently lots of juicy low-register growls.

The opening minute must have shocked death fans out of their wits. Unless they would have liked Marillion of course, as the opening minute sounds like some goof at the record store put Marillion's Misplaced Childhood in the tray instead of Edge of Sanity. The next minute must have been a relief. How brutal and heavy this sounds! The track has some sort of chorus, melodic leads and a wonderfully throbbing bass. This is a track that could certainly be tasted by neo-prog fans that can handle death grunts.

Most of the tracks don't stray too far from melodic death metal, but the clean vocals have become more prominent and the quality has highly improved since the previous album. The songwriting is more catchy, the playing is tighter and the production is amazing. It even has prominent bass guitar! Now, I'm not a big death metal fan though and usually get kind of weary of the relentless brutal attack on my friendly mindset! This album is an exception, it's of consistent quality, has a lot of variation and with Song of Sirens it does a successful homage to my favourite death metal band Entombed.

On the whole, this is a great step up. But the prog ambitions wouldn't really come to flourish until the next album where Dan Swanö took full control of the proceedings. Purgatory Afterglow is a logical choice if you would want to check out another album after their obvious masterpiece Crimson. Too good for 3, I'll grant it 4 light stars, of course considering the tech/extreme prog sub that it resides in.