Graveyard - Innocence & Decadence [2LP]

Tracklist:

Evil Ways
Thin Line
Lost In Confusion
Don't Take Us For Fools
Blue Soul
Submarine Blues
As The Years Pass By, The Hours Bend
Right Is Wrong
Satan's Finest

Gothenburg, Sweden is generally known for producing five (sub)genres of heavy music: Death metal (see: Opeth, Grave, Entombed), melodeath (i.e. At The Gates, In Flames, Arch Enemy, etc.), grindcore (Nasum, Meshuggah, Regurgitate), thrash (The Crown, The Haunted), and doom metal (Candlemass, Katatonia). But even though they share doom metal's love of Black Sabbath and Pentagram, Graveyard does not fall into any one of these subsets. No, this foursome actually has a lot more in common with the tags throwback hard rock and nostalgic stoner metal. I suppose the term stoner rock applies here too, but Graveyard seems like something more than just heavy riffing and a warm, fuzzy groove.

For the most part, though, this is an album that adheres to two types of song: Hard rockers (Lost In Confusion, Don't Take Us For Fools, Submarine Blues, Right Is Wrong, and Satan's Finest) and melodic, psychedelic near-ballads (Thin Line, Blue Soul, and As The Years Pass By, The Hours Bend). Of the hard rocking fare, Lost In Confusion, which is a heavy and big-riff rawker full of meaty, Sabbath-y licks, probably stands out the most.

All that said, this is for the stoners.