**** Entombed

DCLXVI TO RIDE, SHOOT STRAIGHT AND SPEAK THE TRUTH!

(Music for Nations)

The best heavy metal made in 1997 came unheralded out of the north in the form of Entombed, until now a band cosmetically inseparable from the legions of Scandinavian hellions hungrily scavenging the post-Napalm Death grindcore carcass. Nonetheless, they'd already made themselves a pop-music footnote by beating out Roxette in the Swedish version of the Grammys, and they'd since been spotted covering Roky Erickson and the MC5 -- an indication that some sinister rock-and-roll disease is once again infecting high-minded sonic terrorists of all shapes and sizes.

DCLXVI (= 666) is a beginning-to-end masterwork that goes right alongside Slayer's Reign in Blood, Corrosion of Conformity's Blind and, occasionally, Unsane's Total Destruction on metal's (post-Cro-Mag) evolutionary ladder. If that weren't enough, it also goes toe-to-toe with the trials-and-tribulations street polemics of James Brown -- on the title track someone tells 'em they were born to lose, but to paraphrase the Godfather's "Oh Baby Don't You Weep, Pt. II," they couldn't take that for an answer, and they walked on down the street. Elsewhere they wrassle with God, freedom, subservience, pain, the Devil, deliverance, and ecstasy -- only to emerge with the unexpectedly subtle conviction that in the end it's "Everyday victory/ Everyday peace/Just them little, little things that keep you off your knees." In a year of Tool's millennial Floydisms, Korn and the Deftones' urban thrashpop, and bands everywhere else remixing themselves into a (White) Zombified technocoma, this was where the muscle and balls were, and -- surprise! -- the heart and soul, to boot.

-- Carly Carioli