I’ll tell you what, Transcending Obscurity Records, is having a strong run here recently. The tiny Independent Indian label has churned out excellent releases from the likes of Jupiterian, De Profundis, Gaerea , Down Among the Dead Men,  and one of the best death metal records of the year in Depravity’s Evil Upheaval,  and that with releases from Swedish death metal super group Crawl, Phlegeton ( of Wormed) black metal project Lifelost, Hexer, PHOBOS, Lurk and another Rogga Johanssen project, Heads for the Dead albums still to drop later this year.

Finland’s Sadistik Forest will interest Hooded Menace fans as Markus Makkonen performs vocals and bass after performing same roles for Hooded Menace from 2012-2016. But that is where the similarity ends, as Sadistik Forest play old school dirty death metal with a distinct European/Finnish and slight American lean that reeks of somewhere between Autopsy, Convulse, Purtenance,  Cannibal Corpse and a plethora of others.

The guitar tone is nice and hefty and musty, and Makkonen has a mid range shriek coupled of with a subterranean bellow that backs many of the main vocals and of often so cavernous its often inaudible. The albums tarts with two barn stormers in the aptly titled “Morbidly Majestic” and “Decades of Torment Then Death”, which has a killer opening riff. That said, I kept thinking to myself, ‘boy this guitar tone and vocal mix would sounds great if it were slow and sludgy’. Cue, “The Hour of Dread” with its raucous, romping mid paced stench, and now im grinning from ear to ear, especially with more use of the super deep bellows, which fit the more doom/death shamble perfectly.

“Destructive Art” does a 180 degree turn, with almost a black metal opening salvo and riffs but a nice churning climax, before the slow throb of “Zero Progress” teases another slow burner but only in its opening and midsection.  But “Monsters of Death”  and 9 minute closer “Bones of a Giant” delivers in full, swampy, sludgy grandeur with a fierce death metal stab of “The Maelstrom opens” sandwiched in between.

Sadistik Forest is a solid death metal metal, but they are much better sludge/doom band, and when they do delivered an more icky, sickly pace its far more enjoyable then the standard but fun blazing death/black metal.

[Visit the band's website]

---

Comments