Saturday 26 November 2016

Sithter - Chaotic Fiend (Album Review)


Release date: December 09th 2016. Label: Bonten Records. Format: CD/DD

Chaotic Fiend – Tracklisting

1.Chaotic Fiend
2.I Drink Your Blood
3.Smoke Demon
4.Masque of The Black Death
5.Lost Flowers
6.Empire
7.Punisher #13
8.Engrave The Misery
9.Jerusalem Axe Massacre

Band Members:

Hyƶ Kagawa – Guitar
Wahei Gotoh – Bass
Takefumi Matsuda – Drums
Hiroyuki Takano – Vocals, Guitar

Review:

Sithter's second album - Chaotic Fiend - offers another round of Death, Doom, Drone and Psychedelic Madness. Chaotic Fiend is quite a dark, progressive and complex album with the band touching on a variety of dark themes throughout the album. Though the band creates a huge amount of different noises and riffs that keep you entertained throughout the album. The vocals consist mainly of death based growls and a few clean chants towards the end of the album. Imagine a creepier and sadistic version of Church Of Misery and that's the best way to describe Sithter's music.

The lyrical content is handled superbly well as the band conveys a dark sense of fear on the album. Songs such as Chaotic Fiend, Smoke Demon, Empire and Engrave The Misery show that the band aren't afraid to explore dark grisly themes but the band offer some serious Black Sabbath/Electric Wizard riff-loving worship with a touch of psychedelic drone based noise. It's a winning combination though some fans maybe put off by some of the lengthy epic tracks on the album.

It's not an easy album to listen to as the Drone aspect of the bands music can be very hard to listen to at times. The instrumental work is good for most parts of the album. However there are moments where the volume is too low for the band to make much of an impact.

Other than that Sithter have created a deeply unforgiving album especially on the final epic seventeen minute track - Jerusalem Axe Massacre. Sithter embark on a Drone/Doom/Sludge schizophrenic nightmare with distorted psych based noises. The band leave you wanting more as the song suddenly ends after a heavy guitar solo that repeats itself over and over again. Though it still sounds original and fiendishly clever at the same time.

Chaotic Fiend is one of the more interesting Doom Metal albums I've heard from the Japanese Doom Metal scene recently. If you're looking for a more extreme and far out psychedelic take on conventional Doom/Sludge Metal then you will find this album very hard to beat. Sure it has a few flaws but you can't deny the overall quality of this album.

Words by Steve Howe

Thanks to Richard at Sheltered Life PR for the promo. Chaotic Fiend will be out to buy on CD/DD via Bonten Records from December 9th 2016.

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