(What we have for you here is DGR‘s review of the tenth installment from Sadist, just released last week by Agonia Records.)
We’ve reached an interesting period in heavy metal wherein it seems as if every Sadist release is going to be the last one, as if Sadist are held together by fierce determination and super glue – though it’s not clear which one is doing the most work.
At this point in their career the entity bearing the Sadist name has been reduced down to its two founding members: vocalist Trevor Nadir and multi-instrumentalist Tommy Talamanca. Drummer Romain Goulon seems to have bowed out after a four-year stint with the band – which, granted, brought us a pretty mean release in 2022’s Firescorched – and it does not appear that Sadist have settled on a permanent rhythm section since then.
The group nowadays seems to be largely reinforced by the Italian death and groove band Fate Unburied, with three of its four members taking up live duties with the band and its rhythm section performing session work with them as well. Which is the way we loop back around to how Sadist is being held together and what they consist of these days – because clearly someone believes in this band’s angular and bizarre take on death metal. A large part of the explanatory weight is left to the group’s newest material then, an early March unleashing of death metal entitled Something To Pierce.
Photo credit: Nicola Dongo
There’s two converging factors at work on Sadist‘s latest issuance: that the band’s lineup has shifted in the time since the release of Firescorched with a surprisingly short time between discs in comparison to previous works, and that this album is by that nature a little more scrappy and straightforward than Sadist have been in a long, long time.
Often when a band has a continually shifting lineup and is reduced down to the two members that Sadist are now, the following release will be a little more conventional and straight-shooting than the band have been previously. Whether it’s due to the departure of influences contributed by exiting members or songwriting falling to different people, more often than not you wind up with an album that is sleek by comparison to previous albums where the band’s sound had expanded wider and wider.
Sadist are a tech-death band at their core yet not like the modern-age version of it, but closer to the school of a band like Atheist, wherein the odd time signatures and genre explorations are the defining element of their sound, and Sadist have never been any sort of conventional prior to this. It’s why the ‘progressive’ tag for the band has either been in the pilot seat or ridden an uncomfortably close sidecar for the band – because there have been very few ways to describe the musical transgressiveness of Sadist without falling into rabbit holes deep enough to swallow houses.
Even trying to add them into current circles usually winds up with discussions about how they’ve based albums around Hitchcock movies, African mythology, a horror album set in winter time – trying to vouch for a death metal song called “Snowman” is a strange experience – and more. In the past decade and a half, Sadist have written more songs built around the jazz drumming chops of the two gentlemen they’ve had behind the kit than most groups have been willing to allow any member. It’s resulted in an angular, bizarre, and immensely difficult-to-describe take on death metal as a whole, and Tommy Talamanca‘s taste for layering light keyboard work throughout has created multple Sadist songs that have legitimate horror-movie-esuqe ‘sting’ to them at the end of particular measures when they’re not amplifying the melodic lines the guitar might be going for.
In fact, Something To Pierce being as straight-shooting as it is must be killing them in some ways, because when listening to this album Sadist often sound like a beast that is raging against the bars of the musical cage it has chosen. When you’ve had a career that has often taken a blueprint that contains a square foundation and replaced it all with squiggly lines to ‘generally resemble’ your chosen style, you can’t help but brush against the edges of it by habit.
Yet knowing all of this, the newest iteration of Sadist is still shockingly enjoyable. Much like every good progressive artist seems to have a pretty good pop-oriented disc waiting in the wings, so too does it seem that even the most bizarre death metal groups can make something knife-sharp – like a butcher scraping his tools against each other. That’s largely been the impression from Something To Pierce as it has run through its thirty-eight minutes – more so if you’ve grabbed the extended edition.
Sadist take their time exploring on this album. Normally they’d be bouncing from wall-to-wall, rhythmic segment defining the riff and on to the next one with less groove attached to it and more like a constant musical seizure. It has worked for them throughout their career as songs got stranger and stranger, yet it’s nice that they seem to be reigning it in a bit on Something To Pierce. Now you have moments early on in the album where you could describe a Sadist song as something ‘memorable’ from the get-go as opposed to learning the intricacies of each particular dance as it lands on you. There may be some value in playing to the cheap seats after all, because a slightly dumbed-down and reserved Sadist is instead a Sadist full of grooving death metal riffs that only starts to expand as you segue into its back half. You could even hazard the term ‘tasteful’ at times, though that may largely be credited to the extra vocal work provided by singer Gloria Rossi in the early rounds of this release.
Somethign To Pierce is a little frontloaded on the heavy hitters this time around. Sadist aren’t gun-shy about the strangeness in their music but you the bouncier and more jagged songwriting cliffs that they’re known for start rearing their heads more in the duo of “Kill Devour Dissect” and “The Sun God” after the initial three-song volley. It’s tempting to say that the longer songs are where the more percussive Sadist rears its head, but clearly the crew are willing to even put a guest rhythm section to work because openers “Something To Pierce” and “Deprived” both have immense and rolling bass lines that seem to follow the guitar note for note – it is something that they also resurrect for “One Shot Closer”.
Trevor Nadir still pulls out all of his recognizable screams though he stays well within a low growl and earth-heaving mid this time. It seems as if the music is less interested in him building up to his wilder howl than at times before. That Sadist stay low shows a greater focus on the roiling groove than they’ve done before, though there is still plenty of lead-guitar work that rotates between the progressive weirdness and technical nature that has made Sadist incredibly hard to pin down. Something To Pierce even has a couple of teeth-baring and barbed-wire-style riffs that could challenge the current day tech-death leaders in terms of how deft they are required to be for the fretboard dance.
Where Firescorched may have already laid the groundwork for a sharp and scrappy Sadist, Something To Pierce nearly completes the transformation. They haven’t shed all the makings of them as the strange outliers to a lot of the current prog and tech-death discussion, but an engine that has run as long as Sadist is almost free to be whatever it likes.
The two-piece and their recruited crew from Fate Unburied do well for themselves on Something To Pierce. It is suitably mean and snarling when it needs to be and even further removed from the crazed drumming of years past for the band, though they still won’t completely let go of that urge to wander into stranger worlds than their chosen style usually sounds like. Granted, it could be said that hearing a Sadist playing it relatively straight is probably stranger than the group deciding this would be the album to wrap around another far-off-world concept.
Sadist aren’t completely rejuvenated here but they are certainly lively. Every Sadist release seems to appear as suddenly as a lightning strike these days and burn just as hot as the object it may have hit. That sort of energy courses through songs on Something To Pierce and that alone might be just enough to justify its existence.
https://agoniarecords.bandcamp.com/album/something-to-pierce
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