Founding Entombed guitarist Alex Hellid recently sat down with Kerrang! and revealed his top five favorite Entombed records. It's not exactly shocking that he picks Entombed's first three records – Left Hand Path, Clandestine, and Wolverine Blues – but his other two picks are a little surprising. His explanation of why he chose 1997's To Ride, Shoot Straight, And Speak The Truth is a pretty interesting one.
That was the last album we did with Nicke for a while. He was frustrated about the situation we were in because after we did Wolverine Blues everything started taking a long time. We were signed to Earache and there was definitely a lot of miscommunication between what we wanted and what they wanted from us. We got to a bad place and refused to do another record for them. We lost over a year just trying to change management and labels. Entombed had had good momentum and to lose that was very discouraging. When we were finally able to start recording again things picked back up, but it felt strange. We were trying to change everything to be different and for most people we probably changed too much.
For us it was just business as usual. We wrote the songs pretty quickly and we liked them. We recorded them at the new Sunlight Studios in a really hard room with stone walls and we thought that would make it sound heavy. But the cymbals and guitars sounded a lot sharper than we thought they would. When we listened to the final version we liked the way it sounded, but we kept turning it down. We’d start on a really high volume and we were like, “Yeah, it sounds great!” But then we were like, “Wow, I can’t really take more than one or two songs at this volume.”
Check out the full list below, and with the full explanations here.
5. Serpent Saints – The Ten Commandments (2007)
4. To Ride, Shoot Straight, And Speak The Truth (1997)
3. Left Hand Path (1990)
2. Clandestine (1991)
1. Wolvering Blues (1993)
