Covers can deceive. When I first saw the cover and logo of The Ugly's 'Decreation' album, I thought it was a hardcore or punk album. It's not. It's black metal with a big slap of death metal in the brew.

If you're looking for hard and grim music with no frills, no experimenting, no catchy pop refrains, no acoustic pieces - just bone-crushingly solid metal, you want to look in this direction. The Ugly play their black death with ardent conviction and do so very efficiently. Original, no, but indeed with brutality.

Some tunes on 'Decreation' are more black than others, Crawl and Slumber of the God certainly move more away from death metal than the rest of the tracks. If you really want experimentation, Nibiru is probably the track where The Ugly stray most from the clean path of brutality, but all is forgiven, because it works. Favourite tune? Probably Black Goat. Effective Swedish shit, right there.