Sectu
Gerra

More Swedes today, it is the second album by the band called Sectu. They are supposed to be the best Swedish death metal in years and all of that sales pitch that usually comes with new albums. Their previous album Inundate was inundated with great review albeit not by me who did not really fancy the debut album. Now however we have this new album which has a much better looking album cover than the debut which looked quite bad, and this one has been receiving mostly good reviews although I have stumbled upon a few less interested reviewers as well. The label says that they offer more of everything with this new album.

I think that it is more or less the same as the debut album that saw the light of day last year, which is why I do a copy-paste from last years review to describe it: “They do play death metal 101, it is aggressive, brutal, hard hitting, fast, with growling grunty vocals and all of that. The production is also according to the standard format, not much to say about it really. think much death metal and extreme metal in general has a real problem in making the music work as it tend to become just a massive wall of sound or a racket if you prefer that word. That makes it aggressive and brutal but it does not become or feel heavy as the layer upon layer just make it into a racket. This is true for Sectu who feel much less heavy than for instance Hammerfall that I reviewed just yesterday and this layer upon layer thing was also said by Fredrik of Hammerfall when I interviewed him, it was true about Hammerfall and it is also true of Sectu. The thing is, the elements in themselves may be one thing like brutal and fast shredding riffs, aggression in vocals and drums, all of these elements should then work together well and complement one another, for Sectu and many other bands in the genre my feeling is that they rather cancel each other out and in the end we have a rather monotone racket remaining.” So there you have it, there are more tracks on this album and more playing time and possibly more variation albeit there is no variation to speak of.

A yawn is probably my lasting impression of this album, typical death metal that doesn’t do anything to separate itself from everything else in the genre. That is something that begs to question the reason for making the album in the first place, why make something that sounds no different to what is already out there and in great numbers? Now you say that I am not a real fan of the genre and you be right, I am not a major fan of the more brutal death metal genre but there are some that can be said to be alright and this is not really it. They say “One of the best Swedish Death Metal albums for years” conveniently forgetting a whole bucketload of good Swedish death metal that can aspire to be considered to be one of the best Swedish death metal and having made a good album in recent years.

This is probably something you will like if you like brutal death metal, unless of course you think that every album in a genre should offer something new. I don’t think it is bad, it is well made and well produced but it completely lacks a sense of adventure and creativity. I think this Babylonian god of fire would require a bit of an incineration and then a rethink from the band for the future. This is dull.