Sweden’s FILTH have a knack for fitting album covers. The one to last year’s celebrated Time to Rot debut album captured its psychedelically putrid contents perfectly, and so does the cover to their sophomore full-length, Death Exhibition. Whereas that no-less-weighty debut LP proved FILTH were true contenders to old-school death metal barbarity thawed in the present, Death Exhibition sees the power-trio sounding both more finessed and more barbaric. The formula has hardly changed, thankfully, but the foundations of their sound are expanded further here; whether it’s the crude, tank-rolling crush of Grave’s first two albums (including the dips into doomier territory on You’ll Never See…) or the sooty angularity of Immolation’s first two (the birth of the “backwards riff” sequence in DM), FILTH go the distance in punishing the body and tormenting the mind on Death Exhibition. Most poignant case in point: the dank crypt of instrumental “…Inhumed…,” where flanged-out bass begins the plummet to unfathomable depths, establishing both atmosphere and physical presence of a most intimidating nature, and then carried to its conclusion in companion instrumental “…Exhumed…,” where the chasm to (and from) that crypt becomes a hypnotically haunting trudge. Who else is doing such exemplary work with death metal instrumentals? Naturally, other similarly old-school influences can be spotted – Demilich, Autopsy, Incantation, Finland’s Abhorrence – but rest assured that FILTH inject their own personality (and just a slight bit of weirdness) into the bubbling cauldron to remain authentic rather than ripping off someone else’s past. Add in humid, wholly analog production and you truly have a Death Exhibition worth reckonin.
