After ten years of silence, Austrian band Sunterra release their fourth record with telling title ‘Reborn’.
Started their way in far 1998, the band released three albums, in which industrial and gothic metal was mixed with electronic sound, even some kind of dubstep. This brought considerable success to a band, and Sunterra shared a stage with Tanzwut and Crematory. But in 2006 the band took a break for undefined period, until 2015, when the band started to work on a new material that became ‘Reborn’.
New EP contains six songs, where, according to press release «They’re presenting a new and more electronic sound that perfectly implemented in the tradition of the band». And I think that here there’s one big problem.
While listening to this album I had a feeling that the band wanted to show all what they got. There are elements of metal, industrial, EBM, gothic, electronic music – a lots of it. Vocals are also quite various. But mixing of all these ingredients didn’t led to very good results.
‘Reborn’ starts from “Reign Supreme”: middle-pace intro with industrial and electronic elements flows to a smooth riff and some growled vocals. Though female vocals in choruses make this song melancholic. There is not so much electronics and samples, but they are taking a big part of the music. With this, their reiteration makes the song monotonic and even quite boring.
“Shadow In The Dark” with short violin intro could be a neat ballad with a small (and therefore does not interfere) admixture of electronics. But in the middle of the song there music goes to industrial again, with harsh male vocals and slow, nearly doom-metal tempo.
“This Is W.A.R.” is a great example of not very successful style mixing. The song started with some dance sample. Even when it goes heavy, with dominating guitar, it remains «dancy». But the cutting jump to female vocals and lyric line (and back) gives a hard feeling that the song is made from a couple of pieces.
Ending “Shut Up”, which conceived interesting, still sounds a little bit boring, despite the dialog between vocalists. It could be made more tensely, more ominously, but it’s not, alas!
If Sunterra was a young band, it could be said something like «the members have not decided yet what they want to play, so they are experimenting with everything». But Sunterra exists almost 20 years, and it seems that members just forgot the difference between «variety» and «mixing». Now we have a mix, and it’s not so successful.
‘Reborn’ will be released on January, 20-th by NRT Records.
If you really would like to support Antichrist, you can just Share our article.
You can also support Antichrist by sending a couple bucks to cover some webhosting expenses. =>> PayPal
