Saints of Death
Ascend to the Throne

This is the debut album by the band Saints of Death from Canada, a band fronted by a very large person. He doesn’t have that large voice though, and they have released an EP in 2015 before this album. Ascend to the Throne is a seven-track album with a pretty drab and modern death metal kind of cover art and logo. The members are themselves not debutants but have been doing music for other bands for a while, the big singer has done some wrestling and acting as well. They use two bassists and according to the label this gives a unique sounding album, but as I have read those things many times it is hard to believe it, especially after hearing the actual album.

It is modern melodic death metal, perhaps some call it groove metal, there are thrash and doomy, as well as hardcore influences on an album that in the end sounds pretty typical for the modern death metal style. The vocalist also growls in the typical ways and the uniqueness is probably just down to small elements of using double bass that the casual listener never will hear anyway. There isn’t much variation over the album’s seven tracks, the choruses usually enlighten you that you are listening to a new song compared with some minutes ago, the songs kind of blend together into a shapeless mass of death metal and grunting. The short playing time might be a slight compensation for this, but it doesn’t feel like a very exciting album.

This album feels like a bit of a cliché, dull metal warriors who sing dull songs aimed at an audience of mindless drones. Sure, the songs aren’t really bad, just devoid of imagination and spirit, it will never allow these guys to ascend to any throne – especially not the metal throne. If they want to get anywhere, they have to do more than this, a lot more. It isn’t worthy of the chainsaw, but bland and creatively weak albums don’t really deserve much space in the world of music, you need to be fantastic or offer something different otherwise you will just drown in the masses of music being released all the time.

In the end I ask myself what is the point, what were they trying to do? If the goal was to make a drab and uninteresting album they succeeded really well, but I doubt that this will make anything but tine ripples in the mainstreams of the metal world. You can safely overlook this pointless release as it will probably impress you as much as it impress me, when your best feature is that you aren’t inducing vomiting you really need to go back to the drawing board and figure out something better.

HHHHHHH