Romania’s Grimegod took their first steps in the mid-1990s but, in fact, their last album dates back to the now distant 2000s. So it is that, with a revamped line-up and without any founding members, Tillo and Tibor have taken over the reins of the band fourteen years later and well they have done, judging by the results obtained at this juncture. Wrong Roads is, in fact, a decidedly successful work, appreciable above all for the apparent ease with which the Arad-based combo manages to unleash a handful of songs with immediate impact yet equally endowed with a certain depth. Although both vocalist Tibor and drummer Vartan are now also part of the revamped Negură Bunget line-up, no sonorities that harken back to what was undoubtedly the leading band in Romanian metal in the past decade certainly surface on the record; Grimegod‘s gothic death doom fits more naturally into the wake of the latest and most enjoyable Swallow The Sun, a fact that emerges as early as the second track Senseless, although there is certainly no lack of willingness to make variations on a seemingly predictable script, going to the discomfort of, for example, Nightfall in Jump Into The Void, indulging in some fluttering at the limits of symphonic prog in the instrumental The Curse Of The Falling Angel and closing the work with a song in the native language, an aspect whose connotation makes the lyrical part of the tracks particularly evocative. An album, as said, apparently (and relatively, never forgetting that we are still talking about death doom) of easy enjoyment but that, instead, shows between its folds moments of great intensity enclosed mainly in the central pairing Conscience Song – The Last Immaculate Flash (which pleasantly recalls the Lake Of Tears of Forever Autumn reworked in a decidedly more robust way) and exhibiting for Grimegod the stigmata of the band of absolute level. A welcome and far from superfluous return, then, for a band that could derive today those rewards that it perhaps did not get in the first phase of its career.

2014 – Taboo Production