This Swedish band brings one of the oddest albums of the week. It had been awhile since I had picked up anything new from the Swedish label Ominous Recordings, who had released some excellent releases from Conversations About The Light and Diagnose: Lebensgefahr in the past that we've carried. After getting back in touch with the label recently, I found out about this album from a band called Charons Nymfer, which apparently featured the band taking old Swedish music and reshaping it into their own sound. I still haven't been able to learn much about who this band is, or how many other releases they have out, but after I finally got my hands on Se Doden..., I'm pretty hooked. The band uses guitar and bass but instead of a drummer they employ a drum machine, which gives their music a distinct post-punk/industrial feel, but their music is tougher to catagorize than that. All of the songs are taken from the eighteenth century Swedish songwriter Carl Micahel Bellman, who seems to be loved by a wider section of the Swedish metal underground as his songs have been covered in the past by both black metallers Marduk and doom legends Candlemass. Charon Nymfer take it a step further though by paying homage to Bellman with an entire album of interpretations of his music. I'm not familiar with Bellman's music, but it's safe to say that these versions sound very little like the original songs, and instead have been reshaped into Charon Nymfer's bizarre image much like how Dead Raven Choir mutates traditional folk music on their albums. The music is a weird mixture of Bellman's beerhall melodies fused with melancholic Swedish psychedelia, psych-folk strum tethered to plodding drum machine beats, murky trip-hop, distorted acid rock guitars, fractured industrial breakbeats, awesome Yngwie-like shredding, samples of howling wolves, fuzz-soaked doom riffage, even some weird industrialized black metal that appears briefly. If it sounds like a weird mix, it most definitely is, but it all works due to the inventive arrangements and the strength of the source material. It's also really goofy, because c'mon, it sounds like melancholy traditional drinking songs morphed into a lysergic experimental psych/industrial/metal mashup, but in spite of the weird concept, all of these songs are surprisingly catchy and accessible. Trying to come up with some kind of reference point for this stuff is pretty tough, though...the clostest thing that I can even think of might be a cross between Dungen and the newer trip-hop infected futurist-metal of Manes, maybe? Weird stuff!