Sacradis Infernalis

When this Italian black metal band released their first ep "Sacradis Infernalis" in 1998, the reviews seemed not to like the band or the music too much. Most commonly, the phrase "heard before" appeared. And I must confess, this phrase might be correct.

But really, who cares if the music is good? Melodic, raw black metal with an enormously precise drummer - in fact i can hardly imagine that this drumming has not been edited brutally after recordings. The atmosphere cannot be compared to the cold, evil kind of black metal like Darkthrone or the sick kind like Mayhem, but still the music is dark and gloomy. Too bad that this ep contains only 3 real songs (The Black Hen, Longin For Darkness and the title-track), but these three songs are really great!

Too bad, too, that the sound is really awful. The drums are very, very dry and sound very natural, which is not bad, but a matter of taste. But the guitars seem not to be sound-designed for black metal, but for hard rock... it's more of crunch and less of distortion. Nevertheless, this very "simple" sound creates some kind of uniqueness many other bands of this genre lack.

The vocals are black metal-standard... nothing special, but still okay. Only the Italian accent surfacing especially in the spoken vocal passages sounds a little funny in all that "evil" black metal...

So what's the bottom line? "Sacradis Infernalis" is basically consisting of three outstanding black metal anthems, performed in astonishing precision. On the negative side the ep has two excessively boring interludes and a very unmatching sound. All in all I liked "Sacradis Infernalis" from the very first time I listened to it and I still like it very much, and in fact I never heard any other band with this kind of melodic black metal. So much for "heard before"...