So Overrated... - "Far Away From the Sun" Review (51%)
This album "Far Away From The Sun" is a mixed bag of an album.
There certainly is a fairly ominous vibe at first listen.
However, for the most part it is extremely forced. And unlike great black metal, where the more you listen to it the better it gets - see "Verminlust" or "Elysium" - this record is one where, the more you listen to it, the more annoying and cheesy the melodies become.
First, the guitar riffs - or perhaps riff, there is not much variance at all here - are anything but evil, aggressive or dark. In fact, Sacramentum go out of the way to make their riff(s?) sound a bland and lifeless as possible. Which is all nice and good, but why even play black metal then?
"Far Away From The Sun" sounds like a castrated version of "Reinkaos" or, worse, "Nocturnal Silence", and if you have to ask why that's bad...
Furthermore, Sacramentum's riffs certainly aren't innovative - I could hear similar, and better, work on something of Warkvlt, Absurd or even Darkthrone, something to that effect. There simply isn't any originality to be found on "Far Away From The Sun" this is extremely annoying when the obvious old-school worship isn't even EVIL, but just boring... like someone took "Drawing Down the Moon" and said: "hey, the problem with this isn't that it's boring. The problem is that it's NOT BORING ENOUGH. Let's make it MORE BORING, YEAH?!"
There's no real balls to the music, just formulaic symphonic black metal, melodic black metal, or whatever it's called instead of its proper terminology: boring shit.
Sacramenturd should be ashamed of soiling the black metal genre with this crap.
So Overrated...
No speed, no aggression, no real musical proficiency, no innovation, just regurgitated "Filosofem" and "Fallen Angel" riffs played at moderate/slow speed.
Thanks Sacramenturd, like we don't have enough of that.
Second, the vocals are bloody boring, tepid, and again tend to seem forced and completely unnatural. And boring. Is it Dead? Perhaps Varg? Attila? Famine, even? Who knows, who cares, they are so processed to sound generic and bland that it doesn't matter who initially performed them as the "credit" for how they sound goes exclusively to Unisound Studios.
Black metal is notorious for a lack of original vocalists, in my opinion, and Sacramenturd do absolutely nothing to solve this problem.
Third, the faster, theoretically less boring (in practice, not so much), more aggressive blackened death metal sections - there are basically two, in the middle of "When Night Surrounds Me" and the intro to "Obsolete Tears" - they are pure shit, partially due to shoddy production. This isn't the "hey dude, this was recorded in a Morgue whilst masturbating to Mayhem demos" type of raw, it's more the "hey, let's paint our faces with your mom's make-up and try to be evil!" type of raw.
Fake, fake and fake. This is fake rawness for the sake of appearing "true", but they fail even at that as Dissection beat them at their own game both on "The Somberlain" and "Storm of the Light's Bane". I'd rather be able to hear the bass lines and bass drum kicks than listen to a couple of douches try and be "kvlt" to overcompensate for... what, exactly? I don't know.
To conclude, don't spend money on this. Don't even bother downloading it. You'd have better luck painting your own face up and starting your own mellow-dick(less) black metal band. Sacramenturd is weak, and weakness brings forth the worst trends of black metal: DSBM lyrical themes, bedroom cardboard production, screamo vocals, symphonic neo-classical masturbation, MIDI keyboards, melodick boredom, being Nargaroth, etc...
"Far Away From The Sun" is far too overhyped and overrated for its name to be anything more than a big fat lie.
Far Away From the Sun score: 51/100.
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