The thing about Germany’s Nightbearer is that yes, they can do all the HM-2 stuff – and the first two tracks on new album Ghosts of A Darkness To Come they prove that they can do it very well indeed – but it’s the other stuff they can do that makes them a bit special…

For instance the third track on this excellent record, Forever In Darkness, is a case in point. Based around a febrile, funky (you read that right – for the first time ever we’ve got the funk brought to life in the middle of a death metal song!) riff that, if you cleaned it up a bit, might remind you of something off of a seventies’ Kiss or Aerosmith album, it’s a song that literally screams at you to stop what you’re doing and just sit and pay it a bit of attention. It’s brilliant, natch, but it also doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb thanks to the band’s superior grasp of sonics and the fact that they can all play a bit.

Throughout the album you’ll keep coming back to just how good the guitar playing is. That’s not unusual in a death metal act, obviously, but again Nightbearer ratchet everything to a notch or three above the usual here, and the riffage and especially the soloing throughout are really top grade. Dominik Hellmuth and Christian Zysik – take a bow!

Actually, everyone involved should take a bow because, though the wall of sound created by the axework is the album’s main calling card, Manuel Lüke (drrr) and Florian Böhmfeld (brrr) put in a formidable shift in the engine room, whilst Michael Torka‘s commitment to testing out the strength of his vocal chords throughout the album is laudable in the extreme… Overall that slinky daytrip to funktown is a comparative aberration – Ghosts… is actually a pretty faithful study in Swedish death metal – so faithful in fact that I had to keep checking the lineup to make sure the Swedish doyen of death metal, Rogga Johansson, wasn’t involved in some way – and, whether you like it of Stockholm or Gothenburg origin, there’s plenty to latch the ol’ luh holes onto here. Perhaps the best track – certainly the best marriage of chugging rifferama and rapier-sharp soloing I’ve heard in a while – is A Conquest In Blood, but come back to me tomorrow and I’ll probably wrestle you to the floor for not agreeing with me when I push forward the claims of the doomier The Shadow’s Waiting… GOADTC is the sort of album with a song for every mood…

At least it is if your moods are generally grim-faced and filthy, but you get my drift. Nightbearer bring the noise in excitingly exuberant style on Ghosts of A Darkness To Come, and if your school is old school then there ain’t nothing on this record that’s going to cause a frown to cross your blood-stained, gore-flecked visage… trust me.

Ghosts of a Darkness To Come releases on July 29th.