Lombolo - "Här och Där"

The most whimsical Death Metal

I mean, the cover art speaks volumes here.

Musically, Lombolo reminds me immediately of Aggretsuko. It is both lighthearted, whimsical Swedish Folk Metal AND heavy, kickass, sometimes raging Melodic Death Metal; and both sides have a Power Metal spin added for extra depth.

Lombolo consists of three men, two of which have been friends since they were 9; Johan joined them in 2017:

• Lennart (clean vocals, flute, accordion)

• Walerius (guitars, mandolin, kantele, growls)

• Johan (bass, clean and harsh vocals)

And the close friendship clearly plays a huge role in the music they create. It’s tightly honed, but it’s also incredibly fun. You’ll have this really aggressive line of attack with guitar and harsh vocals, and suddenly it’s joined by a flute flittering above it. The DnD-themed cover art helps, in these moments, to paint a portrait of the type of seriously-hilarious hijinx that occur during TTRPGs, and you can’t help but feel that the tonal direction of the music has been influenced by these kinds of experiences as friends.

And it may be, at its core, Swedish Folk Metal, but that doesn’t mean that the band is singularly locked into traditional Nordic subject matter. Sweden is, nowadays, internationally relevant and very focused on the future. They’re also, like most European nations, multilingual. So the fact that two of the nine tracks are in English isn’t remotely surprising.

And that they chose to write “Slap Thyne Enemy (Nazis Must Die)” in English feels very pointed. That sort of statement needs to be more widely understood, according to the band’s choices. And not only is it aggressively AntiFa, it’s also a fucking bop. The vocals are rarely understandable,¹ so I’m just going to post the lyrics here.

It’s a strong message in an incredibly good song, and definitely one I’ll be happy to turn on nice and loud around people who have suddenly decided it’s no longer okay to punch Nazis.

The other song in English is called “Raccoon Platoon”. And it kicks off with a banjo. I mean, Coons are native to the eastern US, much like the banjo,² so why not? And it gets really dark, really fast. The speaker in the song uses a shotgun to kill a raccoon, with gruesome detail in the lyrics; and then an army of the critters rush him and tear him to pieces as they simultaneously invade his home. The song states, straight-up, at the end:

Now from this what did we learn,
let mother nature have her turn
and let all her critters live inside her world

And this may seem a bit pointed, but it’s actually kind of two-sided. Raccoons are an invasive species in Sweden, with evidence pointing at illegal animal imports as the cause. So now there are regular hunts, of sorts, trying to clean out the invasive species, which wouldn’t be a problem if people hadn’t captured and imported these animals as exotic pets.

The album isn’t all silliness or commentary, though. There are some seriously good melodic death tracks - a genre I’m not even really a fan of. Specifically, “Utan Härd (Matkamies Part II)” and “Irminsûl” are incredibly good, mixing strong, dark melodies with powerful instrumentation. Album closer “Det Fjärde Korståget”, at almost nine minutes in length, also scratches this itch, though perhaps less effectively due to the use of “Tarantella Napoletana” throughout. Maybe it has a point? I can’t say, currently.

The album really fires on all cylinders. And while I can’t really judge the overall thematic composition of the album (this is a much smaller band than Megaherz, so there are no lyrics sites with ready-made translations that I can read through at the moment.

But the album is incredibly good, regardless. It’s fun and the music is solid.

Rating: Teal Blue

1. This is due to a mix of factors: accent; sometimes all three singing together muddles it; harsh vocals; and, most frequently, the song’s melodic and rhythmic constraints don’t really meld well with the way native English speakers tend to emphasize syllables. I can make it out if I’m reading along, but just listening, not many words stand out.

2. The banjo, as we know it, was a creation of enslaved Africans in the US, with antecedents and etymological origins in Africa. So remember when next you conflate the banjo with Appalachian hillbillies: it’s just one more thing that whites took and claimed for their own.