### Ingrained: Ashes to dust

#### 23/08/06 || Lord K Philipson

Ingrained hail from Östersund, Sweden. That city is on the rise when it comes to quality death metal since it’s spawned bands like Aeon and Sanctification, among hundreds of others. Ingrained is not up there with those bands yet… but hey, they are definitely getting there. This very nice-looking demo (printed CD, quality packaging etc) contains 6 tracks recorded at various locations from late 2004 to late 2005 but didn’t make it onto the market until mid-2006.

You would think that recording everything at different locations would render them huge differences in the sound, but that’s not happening here. It all sounds fine and if they wouldn’t have told me I wouldn’t know it wasn’t all done in one studio.

Ingrained plays death metal with all the ingredients you could expect from such a band. It’s pretty Americanized at times but still holds that Swedish touch to some of the parts, as if they want us to remember they are from Sweden and nothing else. One thing that put me off at first was reading that they used programmed drums on this one as they didn’t have the ability to record real drums at the time for the recording. But fear not, it’s not that bad. Whoever did the programming did a decent job and it’s not too hard to get used to the sounds and beats, though doing blastbeats with programmings seldom works. And I wish the kicks were a bit lower while the snare could be higher, but it’s working.

What is impressive though is the following: the guitarsolos. This guy obviously knows how to play neat shit with the best of them. I definitely dig some sweet-ass solos every now and then and Oscar knows how to keep them interesting. Good work.

There’s nothing groundbreaking going on with Ingrained but they sure spent some time with their music. It shows. They offer nothing not heard before, but I don’t think that’s their intention either. They play quality death metal and seem satisfied with that. Fuck knows it’s all fine with me.

- Information
- Released: 2006
- Website: www.ingrained.se
- Band
- Jonas Martinsson: vocals
- Simon Ritzén: guitars, backing vocals
- Oscar Bennmarker: leadguitar
- Tomas Grönlund: bass
- Tommy Rehnsbo: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. The weakening
- 02. Scorn renewal
- 03. Ashes to dust
- 04. Deceit of existence
- 05. Blessed
- 06. Beyond redemption