Paganizer is a band from Sweden who have been around since 1998. In that short amount of time they’ve managed to release a demo, a split EP, and 4 full-lengths (including this one). The style of Paganizer has not changed a whole lot of over the years, and on Murder Death Kill they continue to play Swedish Death Metal in the vein of early Entombed and Grave. Everything that Paganizer does is by the book of Swedish Death and it is both a weakness and strength of a band on this release.

All the staples of Swedish Death are here: the growled vocals, the thick guitar tone, the thrash mentality of the drumming, the creepy intro, and the slight groove to some riffs. Surely, Paganizer play this style very well with a lot of conviction and intensity, as Murder Death Kill is definitely a head bangers dream, as it should be. The problem arises from the fact that we’ve heard this before. I must admit however, that Entombed never got this intense and there is more of that Death groove than in most of Grave’s work; in actuality, a lot of similarities can be pointed towards Bloodbath, especially in the vocal department (vocalist Roger Johansson is a dead ringer for Mikael Akerfeldt sometimes). Regardless of the originality issue, the songs still kickass. Mourning Life is a tad boring but the majority of the songs on here are full-speed ahead with a lot of cool riffs and vocals, especially Obsessed By Flesh and Meateater.

As Entombed has demonstrated in the past, this type of Metal can become stagnant, fast, if there is not a sense of immediacy to the song writing. You might be playing fast and screaming your vocal chords dry but that doesn’t automatically make it interesting. For Metal like this to succeed, there needs to be intense drumming that is changing often, with catchy, well phrased vocals, and a nice mix of crushingly fast guitars and mid-paced sections that still make you want to head bang. In this sense Paganizer has more than succeeded at each of these levels and the end result is a CD that does not become stagnant and is rather interesting to listen to from beginning to end, with only a couple of slight miss-haps, mostly in the beginning of the CD.

Paganizer definitely have the talent and song writing ability to create quality Swedish Death, which is especially pleasing since most bands forgot how to play this style for a while there in the late 90’s. Even though the lack of originality is hard to overlook, so are the quality songs. Highly recommended to old-school Swedish Death fans.