Although there is no shortage of top-notch Swedish grind in this post-Nasum world, Gadget have retained a strong core identity amid their otherwise textbook white-out assault.
Their first album in a decade, The Great Destroyer doesn’t concern itself with unexpected detours or evolutionary leaps, but the authority and conviction that edged this band a yard or two in advance of their peers on 2006’s The Funeral March is here in spades.
From the sub-60-second blitzkrieg of opener Enemies Of Reason onwards, this is an object lesson in filthy precision, the jarring crack of blasted snares and the reassuring thump of a well-aimed d-beat ensuring that grind purists will be in their element.
A sprawling epic by Gadget standards, Dedication is two minutes of frenzied, dark hardcore punk, while the similarly lengthy In The Name Of Suffering slithers into skewed sludgy doom territory: hardly the most radical of diversions, but it all contributes to a sense that the Swedes have sufficient imagination and compositional ability to make more records as laudably savage as this one.
