Sinsaenum are the newly founded supergroup featuring vocalist Sean Zatorsky (Dååth) and Attila Csihar (Mayhem) on vocals, Frédéric Leclercq (DragonForce) on the guitars and Joey Jordison (Slipknot, Vimic, Murderdolls) on drums.
As a starting point for death metal this is a fairly good one. It isn’t so wildly abrasive or challenging as bands like Dååth or Mayhem can be, but nor is it so bland that it just becomes walls of heavy noise crashing over you like a stack of cardboard boxes in a warehouse accident. There are some lovely changes of pace from chest-beating groove riffs to eye-wateringly fast low-end thrash, and the guitar work throughout is far tastier than we were expecting going into listening to it for the first time.
Songs like ‘Army Of Chaos’ and ‘Condemned To Suffer’ are decent, although they like many others follow a very noticeable formula. It’s a good formula yes, and one that works for many of the songs, but when you can tell where the willy guitar bridge is going to be, and tell that the song is going to go half-pace chug before it actually happens, something needs to be changed.
And thus begins the unfortunate list of downsides to ‘Echoes Of The Tortured’. The main complaint is that the album is too long by far. Despite every other song being a short instrumental interlude, the twenty-one tracks could have benefited from a lot of trimming down, not least by getting rid of the aforementioned interludes which serve no purpose other than to break the slabs of somewhat basic death metal down into more manageable chunks.
‘Echoes Of The Tortured’ is a passable album, and there is more than enough to constitute a “good” listen. Sadly there isn’t enough originality or world-class performance to entice further listens, and on repeat plays through the lengthy nature causes interest to fade faster than an Alaskan sunset.
ANDY LEDDINGTON