"Swansong", the last album in the history of CARCASS, by no means lived up to the high standards that the band had previously set with "Heartwork"… Apart from the great opening track ‘Keep On Rotting In The Free World’ the whole record pretty much lacked the intensity and aggression of its amazing predecessor and therefore to me always sounded more like a collection of songs that simply weren’t good enough to be included on "Heartwork" instead of a worthy follow-up. The band came across a bit too uninspired for my taste and you could easily notice that at that time their hearts weren’t really into it any longer. While "Heartwork" still was a really hard hitting and to the point, thrashy record, "Swansong" offered a bit more 70s inspired guitarwork that obviously lead to an even rockier and overall more relaxed sounding musical approach. I guess it’s safe to say that newly recruited guitarplayer Carlo Regadas wasn’t exactly able to fill into the big shoes of Michael Amott who had left CARCASS to continue his career with SPIRITUAL BEGGARS… All in all "Swansong" is not exactly a bad record, but definitely not of the same quality as their previous releases either and certainly not something that fans wanted to hear from a band that had already served us eternal classics such as "Symphonies Of Sickness" and "Necroticism" before. This dual disc version once again comes as a massive digipak and apart from all the lyrics it also includes stickers of 6 CARCASS album covers in CD size. There’s also a bonus track on here, entitled ‘Death Rider Da’, which already appeared on the original "Swansong" Japanese edition several years ago… It is not really an unreleased CARCASS track, but an instrumental, fun version of the album track ‘R**k The Vote’ with producer Colin Richardson screaming ‘Death Rider Daaaaaa’ here and there. The DVD side of this dual disc comes up with part 5 of the CARCASS history and deals with the "Swansong" album (obviously), the end of the band and Ken’s illness. Really amusing are the outtakes in which you’ll see Jeff’s various attemps to explain the origin of the "Swansong" cover artwork… www.myspace.com/carcass, www.earache.com