Sinners

Saram play a kind of blackened doom metal or death/doom that to me sounds like “As the flower withers” by MDB but with a far blacker ambiance. Here's more occult horror than erotic literature and at times I found myself drawn into the tracks abysmal soundscape. This being a compilation of an the bands 1998 demo and live recordings from the early nineties the sound is far from pleasing. The guitar and bass tones are quite good on the demo tracks (tracks 1-4) but the drums are a bit too cymbal-heavy. It isn't a huge problem but is a bit annoying. There is also a lot of synthesizers on this album and they are almost never subtle. As they are introduced in the first song “Visions From Beyond” they are mixed to the fore and become the dominating instrument. The sound is more similar though to early Emperor, but cruder, than more symphonic (black) metal bands like DB or CoF. One live tracks the synthesizers are far less prominent. One only has to listen to and compare “Visions of Beyond” and it's live take “Visiones del Mas Alla”.

Songs are quite varied and often contains both heavy parts with growled vocals/screams and softer parts with clean sung vocals. The clean vocals reminds me a lot of Vargs vocal clean vocal delivery on Dunkelheit – they have the same effect of trying to sound pastoral but coming of as a bit lazy. This beauty and the beast approach to songwriting is a tried and tested formula in metal and Saram utilizes it in every track on here. For instance the seconds track “Under a Cabbalistic Moon” starts of as a heavy blackened doom song with layers of synthesizers but contain some sung parts with plucked guitar and an almost pop-sensibility to them. Since every track has that same basic structure of shifting between heavy and soft and growled vocals to sung ones it becomes hard to differentiate the individual tracks from one another – albeit it works well for each individual track. Because of this I often find myself listening to this disc more as an album than a compilation of songs which is somewhat impressive since this contains both demos and live recordings.

I think that this compilation will be a better buy for fans of rougher doom metal (with black/death influences) than for fans of fast blast-heavy black metal since the tempo is more akin to rival that of Hailstorm/Eerie ere Barathrum than anything else. Give this album (either this compilation or the 1998 demo “Sinners”) a listen if you are into heavy dark metal. It's a good album albeit a farcry from being a hidden gem of it's genre or south American metal in general.