Review Summary: A culmination of the raging thrashy sections, the doomy ringing chords, and melodic soloing of their career to date, Dismember's sixth effort is a forgotten gem.
Released in 2004, 'Where Ironcrosses Grow' finds Swedish death metal band Dismember more than fifteen years into a career largely carried by the critical success of their 1991 debut 'Like an Ever Flowing Stream' and its follow-up. Fans of the band frequently cite these two records as their strongest, mixing melodic death metal with more straightforward brutal riffing. 'Where Ironcrosses Grow' is their sixth studio album, seeing the light of day four years after their largely ignored 2000 effort 'Hate Campaign,' and finds the band arguable compiling the various elements of their sound into one of their most potent efforts. Before proceeding, it is important to note the reviewer's biases, in that I do not personally find 'Like An Ever Flowing Stream' to be the be-all, end-all masterpiece that leads it to command such a high average score on this particular website. Instead, I find it a challening album to love, repeating motifs such as the played-out slow leads over doomy ringing chords and the utterly atrocious vocals that seldom feel at home amongst the riffing. That album shows moments of real promise, with their transitions between tempos being a highlight, alongside the drumming performance, and the track "Skin Her Alive" embodies everything the band were attempting to accomplish on that record, but for me it simply felt like a disjointed blueprint that could be bettered in the future. 'Where Ironcrosses Grow' mostly achieves this.
The band's individual performances are top notch on this record, with the drumming once again being the icing on the cake. Fred Estby manages to make even the most mundane, overly abused Slayer-esque beat feel enthralling, either through the addition of glorious fills ("Me-God") or his particular penchant for off-kilter patterns of bass drums ("Chasing The Serpent"). This is a man who makes drumming a true art form, and his maintain a high level of brilliance throughout. The aforementioned "Chasing The Serpent" has a glorious lead fill that elevates the experience, whilst the tremolo picking on "Sword Of Light" would be at home on later Cannibal Corpse records. The vocals - an aspect that felt somewhat lacking or ill-fitting on earlier works - are actually very strong here, blending into the mix at a nice level whilst Matti Kärki brings a real fury in his performance that ensures the listener becomes truly immersed in this brutal and aggressive selection of songs. As for those songs, they are mostly very strong and flow from one to another with little friction. "As The Coins Upon Your Eyes" opens with a mid-tempo groove before exploding into a thrashy rager, making nice use of a split-second break in the sound to lead into a really great tremolo riff, eventually giving way to a foot-tapper bridge. "Forged With Hate" utilizes some great string-skipping in its riffing, as well as the occasional pinched harmonic, once again showcasing a great ear for when to break for the briefest of moments, to allow the next section to hit with greater impact. "Where Angels Fear To Tread" is perhaps the outlier on the album, with a slower tempo, sections with spoken word vocals, and a climax featuring a truly amazing solo. In channeling some Bolt Thrower influence, Dismember found a real highlight here.
Despite the praise, this is not a flawless album by any stretch of the imagination. The use of slower moments that evoke memories of Black Sabbath's doomiest tracks are a nice way of providing variety, yet one can only mourn the absence of the infrequent blast beats that stand so tall on their debut. This band have never been about the breakneck speeds of Cryptopsy, for instance, yet a well-timed blast beat a la "Chapel Of Ghouls" or "Father, You're Not A Father" would give an increased sense of urgency during some of the thrashier moments that feel almost like treading water here. The latter third of "As The Coins Upon Your Eyes" almost cries out for an injection of urgency. Other adjustments that could have provided flourishes of innovation towards the end of this album can also be thought of. How much better would the drawn-out conclusion to "Children Of The Cross" have been with a moment akin to the sweeps in "No Pity For A Coward," or how about the removal of the needless ending to that song where the outro fades out, only to fade back in for another ten seconds? The latter third of this album feels somewhat lacking in comparison to the back-to-back brilliance found throughout the rest of its runtime, with "As I Pull The Trigger" a particularly unsatisfying conclusion. The tried-and-true trick of a slower bridge with a semi-melodic solo really feels stale by this point, and the riffing just misses the mark when compared to the better offerings.
Dismember's "Where Ironcrosses Grow" feels like a culmination of the ideas the band had implemented into their sound by this points. Whilst not quite hitting the highest highs of their first two albums, it manages to maintain a high level of quality for much of its runtime, only let down towards the end by a lack of creativity. This is an album I highly recommend to death metal fans only familiar with Dismember's earliest works, as it definitely has a lot of quality to offer and has been lost into obscurity over the years.
