Review
Seven years after The Throne Within, RAM have set down the mystical preoccupations of that record and picked up something plainer: a heavy metal album about refusing to bend. Against is the Swedish band's seventh full-length, and it reads less like a reinvention than a tightening of the bolts. The riffs are shorter, the choruses arrive sooner, and eleven tracks fit into about forty-two minutes, leaving little room for the wandering that once padded their records.
The speed arrives in bursts. Abattoir pushes toward speed metal with sharp, abrasive guitar attacks, while the title track and Out of Control hold a galloping, rock-leaning middle gear built on interlocking guitar harmonies. Leaving is the outlier, a slow, doom-tinged grind that gives the sequencing a needed breath before the band charges back in. Rising Again leans on the grand, theatrical melody of early-eighties vocal-driven metal.
The weak point sits in the mid-tempo material. Several songs share a similar frame, and after a few plays they can collapse into one long headbang. Even so, the band's choice is clear: fewer ideas, pushed harder, with a stronger sense of who they are.
