CD jewel box with 16-page booklet
I guess some will immediately beg to differ when hearing someone say that Sadist are the most prominent Italian metal act for the past 20 years alongside Eldritch. They took over from Bulldozer, Death SS, Black Hole and the likes in the early-90’s although their vision stretched towards the good, at the time still new, death metal which wasn’t such a common phenomenon on Italian ground at that stage yet. They showed with their excellent debut that they wouldn’t be treading well established territories, but took the lefthand path where innovative acts like early Therion, Disharmonic Orchestra, Phlebotomized, and the Dan Swano projects (Edge of Sanity, Pan.Thy.Monium) belonged. They also managed to avoid the stalemate repetition by sounding different on each subsequent album: the avant-garde, eventful death/thrashing on “Above the Light” was superseded by a lush use of keyboards on “Tribes”; then came “Crust” with its more calculated, dispassionate precise shredding… All the way to “Lego” which was hardly the missing piece from the “lego” with its alternative U-turn from death metal, and arguably the guys’ only not very carefully calculated step.
The very lukewarm, if there ever was one, acceptance of the “Lego” may have been the reason for the lengthy hiatus which was followed by the self-titled effort. Self-titled albums usually hide some underwater stones, but in the Sadists’ case it was a brilliant return to form, a stunning display of technical/progressive death metal wizardry the band wisely shaking off all undesirable musical digressions from the predecessor. Another strong work followed three years later seeing the guys coming on top of the metal scene in their homeland regardless of the healthy competition provided by stalwarts like Illogicist, Coram Lethe, Gory Blister, Infernal Poetry, the psycho-avantgardists Ephel Duath and Psychofagist, etc. And here we are now, facing this “howling hyaena”…
The fear of another puzzle-like failure quickly evaporates into thin air once the listener is reached by the band’s staple precise technical shredding wrapped in deep keyboard undercurrents, spiced by the unexpected spastic jazzy-breaks all this handsomely provided on the encompassing opener "The Lonely Mountain" which also serves a nice balladic outro. "Pachycrocuta" is choppy funkisms accentuated by beautiful, haunting leads and sinister keyboards. "Bouki" is a short twisted technicaller the guitars and the keys duelling throughout. "The Devil Riding The Evil Steed" contains the only more speedy moments on the album the latter later "drowned" by "a sea" of mazey intricate arrangements the middle occupied by an ambient interlude accompanied by a narrative in Arabic.
"Scavenger And Thief" is first-rate puzzling technical death metal with bewildering keyboard crescendos this symbiosis reaching symphonic heights. "Gadawan Kura" is a nice balladic instrumental followed by another exercise in twisted technicality, "Eternal Enemies", the ending being an enchanting Oriental motif taken straight from the Melechesh textbooks. "African Devourers" is an atmospheric cut the keyboards leading the show, and "Scratching Rocks" goes further down the rabbit hole with a portion of oblivious operatic landscapes. The closing "Genital Mask" begs to differ, though, a vortex-like concoction of steely shreds and again more quiet lead-driven passages the latter leading the way out of this mesmerizing listening experience.
The band fans will readily embrace this new chapter from the Sadists' repertoire whereas the more hardcore death metal audience will again stand on the side listening in perplexity to this effort which some may find too farfetched to call death metal at times. The almost complete lack of speed is nothing new, as a matter of fact, and the guys will hardly start shredding with the speed of, or even "above", light since their vision hardly requires such a delivery. To these ears the band's output has always been the more preferred, more dynamic alternative to the fusion wave started by Cynic's 'Focus", Atheist's 'Elements" and Pestilence's "Spheres". The approach never gets too sleepy and entirely abstract, and just when one is about to drift comes a faster-paced technical section to rudely awaken him and put him back on track. The use of keyboards is never overdone, like some biased comments in the media have pointed out, and in this album in particular their role is guiding rather than overpowering which has actually been the case in almost any other work of theirs excluding "Tribes".
Technical/progressive death metal’s palette is vast and immeasurable so talented musicians can tap into those not very charted fields, and can continue to experiment without necessarily altering their style beyond recognition. Right now Sadist are perhaps one of the better examples of how this can be done without turning one into the “laughing stock” of the movement, or making it sound like an entirely new outfit. They don’t churn albums hurriedly on a year-by-year basis so it’s not very likely that they would mess it up with another alien to their discography oddity. Even if they do eventually, I strongly suggest beautiful “howling hyaenas” installed in the background again: this would by all means alleviate the pain from the deviation, and would make “the beasts” exposed to it less prone to mindless Sadistic violence.
Official promo video:
Sample:
