Production: Reasonably clear although guitars are distant and bass is barely audible. Drums and vocals come through well although drum sound is fairly abraded; this works with the nature of the music.

Review: This album begins with a simplistic intro using an engaging slow beat with gradual additions the hazy horizon of fast-strummed guitar chords in a style not dissimilar to black metal, with twisting rhythm melodies played as single-strum notes in a quick unfolding and deconstruction. As cheesy as this sounds this ambient intro brings the listener to the demented onramp to a speed thrill with a deceptively flat feedback squeal.

From an older style of death metal comes this modification to the basics of the genre, a band that uses the powerful speed-strumming techniques of modern death and black metal bands but organizes its songs like an oldstyle metal band such as Black Sabbath, with varied and alternating tempos and different sizes of riffs to calibrate song structure to a different unit of syncopated rhythm. The bands closest to this style would be Unleashed, or later Slayer, with a hint of Pestilence or early Morbid Angel. Tempo variations build a new sense of power into this music which is not entirely tonally unaware, choosing to utilize sometimes unpredictable notes in variations of phrase closure.

Tracklist:

1. Resurrection (2:45)
2. Asphyxiation (5:42)
3. Conflict Within (3:27)
4. Dark Predictions (4:05)
5. Condemned in Misery (5:19)
6. A Mass for Tortured Souls (2:22)

Length: 24:42

Copyright © 1994 Gothic

Vocals are harsh and flattened into a brutal muffled protest riot voice and all instruments are played competently if not securely within an awareness of the complex rhythmic field of this music. Vocals enunciate quiet chants and build parasitic and violent counterrhythms to the flow of the song, intensifying the experience with timbre and percussion. Although none of the elements are very complex, lead guitars manage impressive variation on the sparse but extended solos in otherwise unrelenting tunes; the atmosphere is controlled to be either brutally aggressive or brutally withdrawn and nihilistic.

Like many of its counterparts from this country Sadistic Intent has a distinctively open American sound although clearly possessing influences from European and Canadian metal. Songs are complex enough to include many riffs and permutations, but most impressive is the layering of elements this band uses to build rhythmic tension. Epic breaks and segments of songs are accomplished with much of the same pacing and melodic sense that Slayer utilized on their great opus HELL AWAITS. Its basic conception, fast-strummed old school death metal, may have passed on but this still sounds fresh in 1996 and shows the potential of this band to create an underground classic of unparalleled intensity.

• Sadistic Intent - Resurrection (1994)

• Sadistic Intent - Ancient Black Earth (1999)