Mastodawn

Dead Sun – This Life is a Grave Review By ClarkKent

He must be a music addict. I can’t fathom any other reason Rogga Johansson has so many heavy metal projects.1 Scratching his songwriting itch must require the slightly different flavors of death metal and variety of collaborators each project provides. This latest from his melodeath outfit, Dead Sun, marks, by my count, album number nine for Rogga this year alone, and it is also album number nine for Dead Sun since its formation. Rogga started Dead Sun back in 1996 as a melodic death metal outlet, but he put the project on hold after releasing an initial demo until recording the project’s first full-length LP in 2013. Since then, the band has been rather prolific, if also deeply underground. Dead Sun has never been covered here, and it doesn’t have the name recognition of Paganizer, Leper Colony, or Rogga’s eponymous one man band. Am I about to unearth a hidden gem from Rogga’s arsenal?

Picture a generic Rogga record and you’ll get a good idea of how This Life is a Grave sounds. Dead Sun leans more melodic, along the lines of Rogga Johansson or Eye of Purgatory, yet this is stripped down, bare bones, no nonsense melodeath. It has a muscular feel with pummeling blast beats and powerful, heavy guitar tones reminiscent of Bolt Thrower. Despite the bite-sized songs, each in the three-minute range, the sound is huge thanks to the big production values. Each track features a distinct melodic lead as well as Rogga’s formidable growls. Pair this with the same formula across nine songs and, unfortunately, you have a recipe for some uninspired melodeath.

This Life Is A Grave by Dead Sun

Dead Sun does nothing to mix up their sound across the record’s entire runtime, and Rogga is seemingly allergic to breaking things up with anything as simple as a quick guitar solo. On a casual listen, the songs blend into one another because there are so few standout moments to perk your ears up. One of these standouts is “Nighttime Butterfly.” It has a solid melodic riff and also the only catchy chorus on the record. It is pure Rogga poetry. He growls, “Nighttime butterfly / Your time has come to die / Nighttime butterfly / Now is not the time to ask why.” Using a butterfly as a metaphor for death is an inspired choice that should have our staff Reaper grinning ear to ear. Unless I’m misinterpreting the lyrics, and the one whose time to die is the nighttime butterfly. In which case, I do want to ask why. Joking aside, it’s a solid song and the one highlight amidst some very forgettable material.

This Life is a Grave makes for fine background listening. For those times you don’t really want to pay close attention to what’s playing in your ear pods but want something heavy and meaty blasting your eardrums, this’ll do. On occasion, the album rewards you with some decent melodies (“Embraced by the Succubus,” “Your Life is a Grave”) and energetic drum blasts courtesy of competent kit work from Thomas Ohlsson (House by the Cemetary, War Magic). The mid-tempo pace makes for good music to lift to, as songs rarely pick up or slow down the pace to throw off your rhythm. Dead Sun is consistent, if a little too consistent—it feels like Rogga’s just phoning it in. Where’s the inspiration, the creative spark that would allow the band to go off script or to at least play something that feels alive and not like it was just plugged into a formula and spit out?

It’s pretty sad that I’m ending 2025 by dishing out my lowest score of the year, and for an album that drops less than a week before Christmas no less. I can appreciate Rogga’s impulse to create, create, create because I also have that same impulse when I dive into something I enjoy. 2026 will likely see nine more Rogga projects—the man is a machine. For his sake, I hope he gets what he needs from this prolific musical output. For the sake of listeners, I hope next time he writes something more inspired than this.

Rating: 1.5/5.0
DR: 11 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Emanzipation Productions
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: December 19th, 2025

#15 #2025 #BoltThrower #DeadSun #Dec25 #EmanzipationProductions #EyeOfPurgatory #HouseByTheCemetary #LeperColony #MelodicDeathMetal #Paganizer #Review #Reviews #RoggaJohansson #SwedishMetal #ThisLifeIsAGrave #WarMagic

Hooked On Music Aug 15, 2025

CD-Review - LEPER COLONY - Those Of The Morbid
https://www.hooked-on-music.de/review/cd-review-leper-colony-those-of-the-morbid/16327
#cd #review #lepercolony #thoseofthemorbid

Misery Path Jul 5, 2025

Starting the weekend with some old school death metal from Germany (although the members are quite international) 🤘

#LeperColony #nowplaying

Angry Metal Guy Apr 30, 2025

Leper Colony – Those of the Morbid Review

By Tyme

Have you ever played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? When you try to connect another actor to Kevin Bacon via the films they’ve been in, winners make that connection in the fewest “degrees” possible? A quick reference of the Archives convinced me Rogga Johansson may be the Kevin Bacon of the Swedish metal scene, perhaps the entire metal scene. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that but not to connect many other musicians to him in six degrees or less, as Rogga contributes to forty-eight active bands and has seventeen past outfits on his resume. Rogga’s longstanding relationship with German vocalist and friend Marc Grewe (Morgoth) culminated in the 2020 formation of Leper Colony, which hit the ground running with its self-titled debut in 2023, garnering a 3.5/5.0 rating from Crispy Hooligan. With Leper Colony‘s sophomore effort and first for Testimony Records, Those of the Morbid, I’m primed to find out what kind of Swede-anigans Rogga’s up to now.

Sadly, Those of the Morbid highlights one of the most significant problems with leprosy, and that is shit starts to fall off.1 Which, in Leper Colony‘s case, means way more than a sophomore slump. Every limb left on the diseased body of the debut has fallen off Those of the Morbid‘s frame. Sure, it’s still death metal, but generic in a way that defies legitimate sonic comparison. There are faint Slayer vibes in the harmonized guitar intro of “Facing the Faceless,” I guess, and far-flung hints of Bolt Thrower in the again harmonized leads of “Realm of Madness,” but even these are ‘meh’ connections. Things of the Morbid is full of tepid Rogga riffs, the HM2 more butter knife than buzzsaw, assembled into mostly punk-infused death metal compositions. Jon Rudin (Monstrous) lays down loads of 4/4 straight beats and double kicks with tempo shifts and a few flourished fills thrown in for variation (“Those of the Morbid Inclination”). At the same time, Wombath‘s Håkan Stuvemark handles lead guitar duties, his solos adequate but uninspiring (“Master’s Voice”). And you have Grewe helming the mic again, his unhinged screams, shouts, and shrieks possibly the only thing keeping Those of the Morbid from falling further apart.

Void of engaging songwriting fans expect from a Rogga project, Those of the Morbid has a cut-and-paste feel—photo-shopped band image included—that cling to rigid death-punk tropes and rarely color outside the lines (“Flesh to Rot to Ashes”). Lyrics are horror-themed and amateurish, with the especially juvenile, ‘Suck at the teet, of the Apocalypse Whore!’ one of the more egregious examples. Things of the Morbid is an album a younger, stuck-in-the-midwest me might have come across at Wal-Mart, snatching it up like some uber-extreme gem, but no. There is no questioning Leper Colony‘s pedigree, as each member has had a hand in some of death metal’s more influential offerings, which makes the mediocrity of Those of the Morbid even more baffling.

I’m a person who strives to find the good in everything, which has made covering Leper Colony‘s Those of the Morbid tough, as the tone of this review has been primarily negative. Are there no redeeming qualities within Those of the Morbid? Well, yes, actually, there are a couple. First, I dig the Felipe Mora cover art. It’s what drew my eye to Leper Colony in the first place. Second is the album closer, “A Story in Red.” It’s a decently executed slow-burner with melodic guitar riffs that finds Grewe channeling Lemmy Kilmister and Crowbar‘s Kirk Windstein. Taking up four minutes and fourteen seconds of Morbid‘s very short twenty-nine-minute runtime, though even this track suffers a bit from an anticlimactic fade-out instead of ending on a more confident note.

We’ve reached the end of this review together, dear reader, and I’ve said all I can say about Leper Colony and what I think of Those of the Morbid.2 While I wasn’t expecting the masterpiece nearly a dozen AMG writers believe is somewhere inside Rogga Johansson, I certainly wasn’t expecting this. The bright side is that Rogga’s forty-eight other bands have more to choose from, so I’m not that put out. Playing a rousing game of Six Degrees of Rogga will be more fun than listening to Those of the Morbid, so here’s some low-hanging fruit to get you all started: Glen Benton.

Rating: 1.5/5.0
DR: 10 | Format Reviewed: 320kbps mp3
Label: Testimony Records
Website: Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: May 2nd, 2025

#15 #2025 #BoltThrower #DeathMetal #GermanMetal #LeperColony #May25 #Review #Reviews #RoggaJohansson #Slayer #TestimonyRecords #ThoseOfTheMorbid