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With all the death metal bands popping up in Finland like mushrooms after a rainstorm, it's always nice to find a group of veterans working in a style that differs from that of their homeland. This is what Finnish death metal bulldozer Wretched Path do on their debut, Heavy Lies the Crown, which is a good, honest slab of Swedish death metal made by long-time veterans hailing from acts like Pestigore, Northern Discipline, and Born of Thorns. If you expect this to work in the well-mined vein of luminaries like Gorement and Dismember, then you've listened to Swedish death metal before, but the band stands out by just being better at it than average. Every track is a crisp, heavy example of the style that could have easily been part of the initial boom, and the songs flow together perfectly to make this a tight, cohesive, energetic whole. Sure, there's nothing here that reinvents the wheel, but Wretched Path uses it to bulldoze the listener for a good 30 minutes, and they do it well enough to make me hit the repeat button more than a few times, so they're certainly worth your time as well.