Sinners Burn - Mortuary Rendezvous

No Colours Records

 

 

“Exit Death” is certainly my favourite track from “Mortuary Rendezvous”, featuring as it does a catalogue of the types of killing one may encounter in modern life. “Suicide! Homicide!”, those are the things we want to hear about on our old school death metal releases, and on this shouty, dirty track our wishes are abundantly fulfilled. It can’t be said that Sinners Burn don’t deliver – formed from various components of late-90s retro-masters Paganizer, they’ve got a fine sense of precisely what their listener needs (in order to be pleasurably bludgeoned to death).

 

It should be surprising that these true Swedes haven’t suddenly taken a post-progressive art-rock turn, but on the other hand, there really is nothing that will seem out of place here – low, crunching riffs, mean, chugging and full of swagger and fuzz, devilish leads, a rumbling bass, merciless percussive assault and a grunting, stone-chewing vocal. “Baptized by Evil” is a strong opener, which rolls and grooves with a looseness that doesn’t linger in the limbs for long, once the evil-sounding title track and the stomping “Ancient Gods” have had their way. “Buried in Barbed Wire” is instantly catchy with a neat chugging riff, whilst “There Will Be Blood” stays in the mind longest with its bare-knuckled simplicity and unwavering nastiness.

 

Clearly, then, the classic ingredients are thrown together with fatal force on this album, the second from the band, although the line-up has shifted somewhat since their foundation. This results in a number of tasty moments that will invigorate old-school Swedish death metal fans – those for whom there simply can’t be enough Grave, or Entombed, or Dismember, or Unleashed. It’s great to slip back into that massive, rugged groove, weirdly refreshing to have seven shades of shit beaten out of you by a bunch of nasty Scandinavians, but all the same, this might be a rather specialist interest. I saw Dismember a couple of years ago, and they’re still looking mightily destructive. Sinners Burn don’t bring anything to the table that improves, or even builds upon, the original recipes.

Still, you're not a post-progressive art-rock kind of a reader, most days, so you don't care too much about ingenious re-imaginings of the wheel. You want your brain to be damaged while you throw some fellow caveman to the ground amidst a sea of boots and beer cans. I want that too. In Swedish. Seriously, "Mortuary Rendezvous" is something you've heard before, but let's face it, you want to hear it again. It's got a cleverly balanced sound, with a hefty dose of garage blood, easily allowying you to slip into the requisite mindset, and the riffs are classic and enthusiastically delivered.

 

67/100

Ellen Simpson

 

www.myspace.com/sinnersburn