Creozoth

Ever wonder what a "Creozoth" is? Well, let guitarist Lars Johansson explain: "It is about a man who eats so much that he explodes in a Monty Python movie...it is also a 12,000-year-old plant that lives in the American desert, and also a deadly poison that killed many railway workers." Now that the explanation is out of the way, it also the name of a side project that includes several members from Swedish metal veterans Candlemass — Johansson and drummer Jan Lindh — who are joined by singer Michael Storck and bassist Tobbe Moen. The project turns out to be Johansson's baby, though, as he wrote and produced the whole bloody thing all by himself. Expectedly, the result is your straight-ahead metallic-sounding release — in other words, no nose flute concertos here, folks. Creozoth's self-titled release is comparable at times to vintage Iron Maiden (Storck's vocals) with beefed-up, Sabbathy guitar riffs (Johansson's guitar) — especially on such tracks as "With the Flow," "Forsaken" (which contains a nifty, albeit brief, instrumental Sabbath breakdown), and "Mind." Creozoth don't exactly offer anything new in the metal genre, but that was probably the group's goal — to create an album patterned after the elder statesmen.