GRAVEYARD
Hisingen Blues
Nuclear Blast, 2011

By Shane Pinnegar

Not the chattiest of folks, Sweden’s Graveyard prefer to let their music do the talking – which of course would only work if the music is strong enough to stand up and say something.

Luckily that’s exactly the case here.

Essentially, Graveyard are a blues band – a very heavy blues band a la Cream, if Clapton had grown up listening to a lot of Sabbath. The blues, in a nutshell, crossed with some tasty doom.

With nods to the classic sixties bands Pink Floyd, the aforementioned Cream and The Grateful Dead, Graveyard even manage to tread a little similar ground to San Francisco’s underrated Trouble.

It’s easy to view “Hisingen Blues” as a stoner’s album and yeah, it’d be a delight to the herbally enhanced, but there’s a lot more here to enjoy.

Highlights include slow burner ‘Uncomfortably Numb’ as it builds from a sparse intro and the sorrowful lyric “I’ve been leaving you since the day that we met” to a shuddering emotional climax, ‘Longing’s spaghetti western vibe, and once you get past the death metal name, the “analog only” gimmickyness, and the stoner blues tag, there’s a real beauty to be found at the heart of this album,