Down

I started the Sentenced saga with “Amok”, an album I loved, and still do, to the tiniest bits imaginable. I naturally tracked down the band’s previous two instalments, and came across another equally captivating albeit differently styled masterpiece (“North from Here”) and one pretty decent traditional old school death metal slab (“Shadows of the Past”). I didn’t exactly run amok on the “Love & Death” EP, but I found absolutely nothing wrong with it as it could still be viewed a fair warm-up for “Amok II”.

I was one of the first metalheads in my hometown to purchase the “Down” cassette when it landed in the shop next to you… sorry, us. Three days later I was looking for someone to give this tape to… as a present, I mean. “It’s that bad, hey?” No, it’s not that bad; it’s just that it was nothing like I expected. I did give it a couple of listens back then, including another one the other night, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to bother with it anymore… not in this lifetime anyway.

But I should have envisaged this direction the guys took here; quite a few once-rowdy extreme metal cohorts (Paradise Lost, Amorphis, Therion, Cemetary, etc.) had already shed their skin more or less drastically a year or so back… the road towards the much less aggressive dark/gothic metal arena was already well-paved. The thing is that in the Sentenced case “Amok” was already a “beyond death” experience, the newly introduced dark gothic atmosphere nicely enhancing the suppressed aggression; they could have capitalized on this potent, still audibly belligerent, sound some more before the inevitable softening stage… but no. The guys wanted to go down… and down they went… not exactly head over heels but still.

Yes, it’s true that the band managed to release something different on each of their first four albums but, unlike the case with acts like, say, Therion and The Gathering, who were also going through various stylistic metamorphoses on an album-by-album basis at roughly the same time, the quality was going up with each subsequent opus… here everything came close to plummeting. I have to give it to the guys for retaining the intrigue with the odd catchy memorable chorus (“Noose, “Keep My Grave Open”), and it’s good that those are around, otherwise there wouldn’t have been any highlights on this blasé-executed, not very eventful recording. There’s very little drama to be generated from this dark/gothic metal delivery which strides are either melancholically balladic (“Crumbling Down (Give Up Hope)”) or pop-ishly bouncy (“Bleed”), the more romantic material not receiving the requisite support from the vocal department where the guy’s hoarse semi-clean croon very seldom vacillates towards the more attached parametres. It’s true that others, not as melodic vocalists (Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost), Mathias Lodmalm (Cemetary)) also operate within similar anti-poignant singing territories, but in this case we have a performer who refuses to get emotionally involved in the proceedings even for a bit, staying on the same composed semi-listless range from beginning to end.

But it’s not the vocalist that is the major spoiler. In fact, the word “spoiler” can’t be uttered legitimately here as there are hardly any such ones. It’s just that the whole album flows in this samey lethargic monotonous pace which lulls the fan to such an extent that even if there was a more overt spoiler inserted somewhere it would have remained unnoticed. But don’t blame it on the fans, please; it’s simply hard to give your full attention to an album that doesn’t change the pace, the pitch and the tone even for a split second. And the whole package doesn’t sound original by any means; like already mentioned, other acts and albums did the pioneering work for our Finnish friends. Well, they could have borrowed some of the boisterous, more diverse tricks from “Black Vanity” or “Draconian Times”, or even “Lepaca Kliffoth” for that matter… nah, why bother? After all, it’s not the way up they were treading.

I often view the dark/gothic metal carnival as the 90’s analogue to the 80’s glam metal movement. They both appeared as the softer, melodic alternative to a bustling extreme metal (speed/thrash/proto-death/grindcore in the 80’s; black/death/industrial in the 90’s) wave, both emerged in the middle of the decade, flourished in the second half of it, and at the start of the new one were pretty much over and done. Well, the gothic metallers survived longer, certainly, first because theirs was music more seriously executed and attracted others apart from the teenagers and the posers; and second cause the gothic metal cohorts never bumped into serious music distractors/destructors like the grunge and the alternative.

Sentenced remain an indelible part of said wave, and stood proud on the crest all the way to 2005 when they “buried” themselves… alive as evident from the lives and the videos that followed. An admirable achievement? Perhaps, for some. For me personally, especially considering what occurred in their camp before this “Down”fall here, anything more than a condescending pat on the shoulder regarding their second creative period would already be too much of a praise.