If you can wade through the slightly tedious Slayer/Sepultura shenanigans featured on the first two tracks on the new Konkhra album, then there’s actually a fair amount to get excited about on the remainder of the record.

Those tracks – Sad Plight of Lucifer and Revolution – don’t stink, I should mention, but they add nothing to the overall gaiety of nations with their grim faced grinding. Far more interesting is third track Seven Plagues, a piece of music built on interesting rhythmic pulses and some nice guitar lines that really capture and evoke the subject matter. I might be a bit out on a limb here, but death metal that piques my interest, takes me to other places at the flick of a riff, is the sort of death metal I can really get behind. And this track does just that.

The Lesser Key of Solomon is more straightforward structurally but still manages to get the extremities twitching, thanks in part again to the superior drumming of Johnny Nielsen, who impresses throughout and the utterly convincing riffage of vocalist Anders Lundmark and Kim Mathieson, both of whom sound massive on this track. Resurrection Machine strays again too far into Sepultura, um, territory, for this writer but is saved by some superb lead work, but the album ends on an absolute high with the savage battery of Tentacles of Madness, a punishing slab of epic death metal that sees the bass of Martin R. Patterson pleasingly prominent in the mix and which brings a slightly more progressive edge to the party which is very welcome.

At the end of the day my complaints about this record probably all boil down to matters of personal taste; viewing the album dispassionately, the performances here from all involved are uniformly superb, and Konkhra can be very proud of what they’ve added to their already extensive canon. If you have some space in your life for a dose of traditional death metal, you could do a lot worse than pick this album up.

Sad Plight of Lucifer releases on November 29th.