Ulcer

Artist: 
Album Title: 
Grant Us Death
Release Date: 
Monday, January 28, 2013
Distribution: 
Review Type: 

It might be hard to accept, and one won’t believe it, but Ulcer aren’t a band from Sweden. In fact, they hail from Poland.

The band was formed in 2006 and there was a self-released debut full length in 2007, called Serpent Trinity. There was supposed to be a split-EP earlier this year with Graveyard, but I’m not sure this piece of vinyl had actually been released in mean time.

[FYI: there are other Death Metal acts with the very same moniker: one from Germany, which is rather fun-oriented; an American one, of which I think they disbanded a decade ago; and apparently one from the UK, which did not exist that long at the end of the nineties]

Even though most members are active in Blaze Of Perdition and Deivos, this isn’t just a side-project, nor is it a copy of one of those great bands. No, Ulcer indeed is a Polish version in the spirit of Nihilist / early Entombed, Unleashed, Dismember and Repugnant. And this goes for really every single detail: the riffs, the rhythms, the tempo, the grooves, the vocals, the texts and even that characterising production / sound (not done in Sweden, by the way, yet at the Sinquest Sound Studio).

Only a handful of moments is different from the mediocre Ol’School Swedeath-approach, and this quasi-shameless copycat-edition is almost uncomfortable to listen at. The performance and the song writing (song structures and technics) are, for not hailing from Sweden, extremely professionally concretised, with a fantastic drive (read: concrete balls!), but a footnote be made: the whole sounds too heard-it-before and too unvaried. That’s a pity, for this stuff seems to have so much potential.

Overall conclusion: acceptable but demonstratively overdone.

78/100