The album comes in some pretty plush packaging, and it’s befitting of an album as grand in scale as this. It’s clear that Sinnergod have gone all-out on the production on every front: the sound is immense, the songs swell with a sense of the epic. Offering up an album that places the band, by their own admission, somewhere between Depeche Mode and Iron Maiden, drawing on Gary Numan and Metallica along the way (and bearing a logo, not by their own admission, that’s extremely derivative of Nine Inch Nails).
Everything you’d expect to be in place is present and correct. Sweeping synths and staccato guitars glide in on a cinematic intro, and big riffs crash in on a wave of blood and portent. Strings sweep in moodily and there are stabs at stomping dancey goth-disco (‘I Never Had a Gun’). The sound is big and the songs are big on drama musically and lyrically, and emotional states are expressed as endless rain, burials and eternities in hell.
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But as bad as the clichés about sins and demons are the plain clumsy couplets (‘In our heads we’ll play dead / we'll fuck each other up instead, yeah’). But with the crisp production and focus on creating tracks of an epic depth, they seem more concerned with filling arenas than and album with real punch.
The weakest feature is by far the vocals: Mark Hampson is a good singer. He has a keen ear for melody, and apart from the occasional James Hetfield moment, it’s simply too clean to have the level of impact appropriate to the music, the image or the cover art. For all the pomp and posturing, it’s got the blood, but not nearly enough guts.
Sinnergod Online
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