SANCTUARIUM – Melted and Decomposed

vote
7.5

• Band:
  SANCTUARY
• Duration: 00:48:18
• Available from: 03/09/2024
• Label:

• I Saco An Ojo Records

Streaming not yet available

One might think that Sanctuarium wanted to play with the great death-doom repertoire of the last thirty years to package their new “Melted and Decomposed”. The Spanish group – started as a solo project of the multi-instrumentalist Marc Rodriguez (Calderum, Jade, Trollcave, Stygian Storm and many others) and then became a real band – comes back about a year and a half after the release of their first album “Into the Mephitic Abyss” with a second full-length in which the formula of the debut is reaffirmed and in some ways expanded. Also on this occasion, Sanctuarium do their best to draw heavily from what has been expressed by the genre in this long period of time, while still managing to maintain the coherence and stability of a unitary album. Of course, everything is favored by the very lo-fi approach of songwriting and interpretation: even in their wandering between different registers, with the stentorian death metal soul guiding many of the riffs and the consequent doom drift opening painful scenarios, the guys keep everything within a rather traditional structure, thus avoiding trying their hand at psychedelic temptations, long mantras for distorted guitar, liquid keyboards in uncontrollable expansion or cosmic flows of a floydian. Compared to the recent efforts of a much talked about band like Spectral Voice, the band is less visionary and therefore more square, with a sound that hinges on riffs and exhausting crescendos full of anxiety, with the torment of the dominant themes that hark back to the masters Disembowelment, Incantation and Winter, obviously passing through more recent bands like Mortiferum or the same Spectral Voice of their early days.
Compared to “Into…”, “Melted and Decomposed” is still larger and richer in elements: starting from the length – with five tracks lasting an average of nine minutes each – it is easy to see it as a more imposing work, in which the group has tried to explore various extremes of their sound, starting from some minimal riffs that build and evolve with trajectories that only apparently present the characteristic of regularity, to obtain a microcosm of variations and nuances that requires numerous listens to be completely assimilated.
Perhaps here and there a little more ability to synthesize would have been useful, but it must be recognized that each composition, in its wandering in the abyss, always manages to give a glimpse of the beating heart of the band, through some excellent ideas both in terms of guitar riffing and on a melodic level.
In the end, all the eloquent promises of the album cover and title are more than kept: the tracklist amply denotes Sanctuarium's considerable knowledge of the subject, reaching a rare balance in similar operations and proving to be particularly appreciable in 'dedicated' listening conditions, better if with headphones and in the evening/night hours.