• Source: Left Hand Path (album)

Left Hand Path is the debut studio album by Swedish death metal band Entombed, released on 4 June 1990 by Earache Records.




Background


The album was recorded in less than a week in late 1989. The tracks "Left Hand Path", "Drowned" and "Bitter Loss" were written days before the band entered the studio, and Entombed guitarist Uffe Cederlund retroactively laments the tracks as sounding unfinished and "really sloppy".
Entombed vocalist Petrov recalls that some lyrics were changed in the studio, and that while tracking vocal takes, guitarist Nicke Andersson would stand behind him with a lyric sheet and point at what lines to sing.
Uffe's guitar tracks were panned to the left and the right, while Hellid's guitar tracks were panned to the middle. The band did not have a permanent bassist at the time of the album's recording, so the two guitarists took turns tracking basslines "every second song". It is unknown who tracked bass on which song, but Cederlund believes he may have tracked bass on "Drowned" and "Revel in the Flesh".
The title of the album refers to the left-hand path belief system. Guitarist Alex Hellid found the term in Anton LaVey's book The Satanic Bible, but Nick Andersson (who was the "big boss") made the final decision that it would be the album's title.
The title track contains an interpolation of the theme from the 1979 horror film Phantasm at 3:54.




Style


Left Hand Path is noted for defining the style of Swedish death metal by being the earliest known album to feature the "down-tuned, saw-like guitar sound", which would later become a staple for the regional scene thereafter. The guitar tone was achieved using guitars tuned to B standard tuning through a Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal pedal with all the controls set to max. These guitars were panned to the left and right channels, while a third guitar using a Boss DS-1 distortion pedal was placed in the center channel along with the bass. Entombed guitarist Leif "Leffe" Cuzner (who had previously played guitar in Nihilist) has been credited as the "creator" of the Swedish death metal guitar tone. Cederlund remarked, "Everybody had that pedal, but Leffe was the guy who cranked everything to 10 first. That pedal is a really bad distortion pedal, but everybody had it because it was the cheap pedal to buy back then." Andersson elaborated "yeah, there's four knobs on it. One of them is all mids, and if you put that on 10, that's how you get that sound. If you just have the regular Boss distortional [pedal] (the orange one) there's only high and low [...] first we thought the sounds was his guitar or his speaker, but it was his pedal. When we found that out, Uffe started using one too. Then Dismember bought the same pedals." According to author Natalie J. Purcell, the album also features "Punk-like and groovy rhythms offset with deep, Doom-like sections".




Legacy


Left Hand Path was ranked No. 82 on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time".
In August 2005, Decibel inducted Left Hand Path into the Decibel Magazine Hall of Fame, naming it the first "proper" Swedish death metal album, with the "buzzsaw" guitar tone being crowned as the legendary "Entombed sound".




Cover versions


Two songs from the album were covered by Belgian death metal band Aborted: "Drowned" for the re-release of The Archaic Abattoir and "Left Hand Path" for the EP Coronary Reconstruction.




Track listing






Personnel


Entombed

Lars-Göran Petrov – vocals
Uffe Cederlund – guitar, bass
Alex Hellid – guitar
Nicke Andersson – drums, bass
Technical personnel

Tomas Skogsberg – production, engineering
Dan Seagrave – cover art
Micke Lundstrom – photography
David Windmill – design




References

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