Artist: Sjodogg
Label: Osmose Productions
Release: year
After a good four years together and three demos, Norwegian outfit Sjodogg have finally put out a studio album with eleven mostly atmospheric tracks that conjure up feelings of dread and transience.
Right from the first song you can hear a ton of different metal genres and subgenres melting into one avant-garde, slightly progressive Black metal murk that runs through the whole album and tries to use monotony to recreate that proper, original sense of horror from the first wave of Norwegian Black metal. That feeling works for about two or three songs, but then it gets really draining and almost boring, because the rhythm barely changes from one song to the next. Only the drum tempo and the vocal intensity ramp up now and then, and nearly every song is propped up by an overuse of the bass drum, which is often way too prominent and buries the toms and cymbals.
The guitar part sounds extremely unsure of itself and is mostly buried under the heavy vocals and aggressive drums, so all you can make out are individual riffs, since there’s no trace of any longer solo work whatsoever. The acoustic guitars, though, are brilliantly integrated into the album, serving as a kind of intermezzo between songs. Overall the whole guitar section sounds pretty gloomy, and in playing style and tone it recalls the guitars and effects you often hear in Funeral Doom, except that the riffs change faster here.
The biggest letdown on the album is without a doubt the vocals, which rarely change tone and, apart from a few clichéd lines, don’t offer much joy to listen to.
Landscapes of Disease and Decadence feels like a prisoner of timelessness: it contains elements typical of the avant-garde that emerged in the Black metal scene in the first half of the 90s of the last century, yet production-wise it’s almost ahead of its time. In a way the album imitates bands like Ved Buens Ende, and in a way it breaks new ground and pushes the boundaries of extreme metal as we know it today.
I’d definitely recommend the album to fans of slightly rougher rhythms, because it’s something special and hard to put into words, like a pile of emotions that gets released the moment you hit Play.
Lineup
Vulnus: vocals
Dracunculus: guitar
Tetrapus: bass guitar
Hordeolum: drums
Track list
1.Intro (03:54)
2.A Song Of Plague (06:10)
3.Inglorious Fever Of Antonius (05:18)
4.Mahapaatra (06:24)
5.Brethren Of The Weeping Corpses (02:09)
6.Sequestra (06:54)
7.The Asphyxiation (06:20)
8.Sentinels Of The Severed Flesh (00:24)
9.Sacrosanct (01:28)
10.Kiss Of The Blowfly (06:32)
11.Outro (00:45)
