My breakdown of the Peavy trade is up now for Insiders.

Entombed was one of the most important bands in the history of heavy metal, a death metal act that veered hard back toward the mainstream with their epic 1993 album Wolverine Blues, which featured substantially slower tempos, fewer blast beats, and somewhat more comprehensible lyrics. The band didn’t eschew its detuned guitar sounds or heavy riffs, but the newer style drew more from classic dark metal acts like Black Sabbath and Slayer, rather than the straight-on (and in my opinion unlistenable) early Nordic death metal pioneers like Mayhem or Emperor. Their new style earned the moniker “death-and-roll,” although that sounds pejorative to me rather than recognizing that what they were doing was ingenious.

Personnel disagreements splintered the band, however, and founding vocalist LG Petrov has split off with three later members of the band to form Entombed A.D., whose debut album Back to the Front is set to drop on August 5th. It’s not Wolverine Blues, but it’s very much in that vein, with huge, heavy, almost bluesy metal riffs reminiscent of British Steel-era Judas Priest, along with unmistakeable death-metal elements like growled vocals and faster percussion. The album is uneven, but fans of Entombed’s work with its classic lineup should be interested in the new output.

Back to the Front couldn’t start off any better, with the menacing “Kill to Live” driving forward on thick buzzsaw guitar riffs, leaving the rapid-fire drumming just to brief passages that punctuate the heaviness of the verses and chorus rather than overpowering the music. “Second to None” employs a similar mix of elements, like a sludgier, bluesier track left off of Pantera’s A Vulgar Display of Power. (I’m not a Pantera fan, though, as the whole “groove metal” movement left me cold.) The closer, “Soldier of No Fortune,” sees Entombed stretching out into more melodic territory, a nearly seven-minute opus with multiple segments and tempo shifts, but which never loses the force or heaviness of Entombed’s signature sound.

The album veers back and forth from the Entombed death-and-roll sound to some more conventional death-metal numbers, and the quality of the songwriting rises and falls at the same time. “The Underminer” opens with a incredible rapid-fire guitar riff, but the whole thing is, er, undermined by the blast beats that follow and wipe out the guitar sound. “Bait and Bleed” has a similar problem, starting with a pair of overlaid guitar lines that would appear to promise more complexity, but by the chorus we’ve drifted into more cliched death-metal territory and lost the plot of the opener. Even “Bedlam Attack,” which has some tempo shifts later in the song, loses me with the fastball before we get to the changeup because it’s so repetitive.

I said on Twitter last week that this album isn’t as good as Wolverine Blues, but it’s a solid add to the Entombed canon. The more I’ve listened to Back to the Front, however, the less positive I feel about it. There’s too much here that I think I’ve heard before, from Entombed’s early/mid-90s output to the groove metal movement to earlier touchstones like Motorhead, Sabbath, and Slayer. If you’re a longtime Entombed fan, Entombed A.D. won’t disappoint you, but I don’t think it’ll stay in my own rotation for long.

Arch Enemy’s upcoming release War Eternal (due out June 10th) is the Swedish melodic death metal band’s first with new lead growler … I mean, singer Alissa White-Gluz, their tenth album over a now 19-year-career. Arch Enemy has always been among the most accessible acts in the melodeth subgenre, producing fast and heavy but, other than their debut album, not brutal tracks with clear melodic elements, technically sound guitar work, and solid vocals that didn’t distract from the underlying material. War Eternal has several tracks with the same musical strengths, but White-Gluz’s vocals and lyrics are a big step back from the band’s previous work, and sometimes it seems as if the vocalist change may have spurred a change in musical direction toward less adventurous material.

War Eternal opens somewhat promisingly, with a brief instrumental (in F minor, as the title tells us) before we get to two of its strongest tracks, the muscular “Never Forgive, Never Forget” and the raging title track. “Never Forgive” is driven by a simple six-note guitar riff repeated throughout the song that breaks apart the high-tempo verses and the staccato-plucked interludes, and the shredding in its two-part solo is probably the album’s strongest for pure technical skill. “War Eternal” opens with a marching pattern at machine-gun speed before downshifting into a pattern that seems drawn from classic ’80s thrash acts like Testament or Exodus, adding sophisticated melodic twists before each chorus to distinguish the song. It’s a shame that it’s brought down by its simple-minded lyrics (“Friend or foe/There’s no way to know” … this is the best they could come up with to open the song?), something that plagues much of the disc.

There’s a lull mid-album, including the cloddish “As the Pages Burn,” where War Eternal loses some steam, but a second instrumental, the glam metal-inspired “Graveyard of Dreams,” serves as a bit of a reset button before the furious strumming that opens “Stolen Life,” the track that should most satisfy fans of Arch Enemy’s previous work. The album needed a song like this: a taut, straightforward three-minutes of speed metal, with riffs to make Dave Mustaine proud (if he could stop patting himself on the back for a few moments). That combination of songs gives the listener a chance to breathe before the last standout on the album, the five-minute opus “Time is Black,” a theatrical and sometimes bombastic song with several tempo shifts and classical elements better integrated here than on “Avalanche,” which has “trying too hard” written all over it. It might have been better to follow “Time is Black” with “Down to Nothing,” which opens with a heavy grindcore pattern that reminded me of vintage Carcass – unsurprising, as Arch Enemy was founded by former Carcass guitarist Michael Amott, who worked on their landmark album, Heartwork, the album that did the most to establish melodic death metal as a viable style.

The main drawback in White-Gluz’s vocals is her style of growling, where she’s reaching so far down to get that gutteral sound that she sounds like she’s retching, and she rarely varies this style so the listener never gets a break. Extreme metal already has a sort of built-in bias against female vocalists because of the genre’s preference for these Cookie Monster vocals, rather than the kind of operatic singing associated with British metal of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sing-talking of 1980s speed metal, or the death-screeches of Chuck Schuldiner (of Death) or Jeff Walker (of Carcass). White-Gluz’s predecessor, Angela Glossow, found an adequate medium with a higher-pitched growl than male death-metal vocalists employ, but White-Gluz is aiming for a lower register and it doesn’t work for me. She also is far too prone to employ the most cliched move in extreme metal, roaring at maximum volume over the opening riffs. (Note to aspiring death-metal vocalists: Don’t do this.)

War Eternal also suffers from a lack of ambition, outside of “Time is Black” and perhaps “Avalanche,” sticking mostly to straightforward thrash with death-metal vocals and blast beats, when they’re at a point in their career where you’d expect more experimentation. I prefer metal with progressive or technical elements, such as on Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun, but if you’re interested in Arch Enemy I’d suggest starting with 2003’s Anthems of Rebellion.