Sonne Adam

By Júlio Valada on Mar 19, 2011 in Cd Review | 0 comments

Album: Transformation
Label: Century Media
Tracks: 9
Release Date: April 4th
Lenght: 41′ 44″

Riff Score: 9.5/10

Sonne Adam is an Israeli death metal band, and with that statement I may have caught your attention for the next minutes. It consists of only two members, Davidov handling all instruments and Dahan in charge of the vocal delivery. What makes it even more impressing is the fact that with only an EP released on Imperium Records last year, they’re now due to release their debut album on giants Century Media. So what can we expect from a country that brought us oriental gems like Melechesh, Orphaned Land and Salem? Music of the highest quality for sure!

The band tells us from the beginning that their major influences are Paradise Lost during their early efforts in the death/doom scene and Morbid Angel, in particular the song “God Of Emptiness”. Now can you imagine a mix of Lost Paradise and Covenant? Add the name of the band, which is Hebrew and can be roughly translated as “Hate Humanity”, and a fixation for occultism and apocalyptic themes and you have a package that’s already hard to understand if it’s for real or not. I mean at least in theory this band should be amazing, sound evil as all hell and have a nightmare-inducing atmosphere.

The album begins with “We Who Worship The Black” and from the first seconds you can see you’re in for something terrifying. The first sludgy riff hits you in the face with a doom tone that immediately floors you, just so a few seconds later the next riff comes in and strikes you as hard as a sledgehammer while you’re still trying to get up. A tremolo-picked riff is being repeated while the rhythm guitar keeps the slow pace and the cymbals resonate in unison, followed by a small quiet passage that only preludes what’s to come…and then all hell breaks loose! A sludgy dissonant riff that could belong on Morbid Angel’s Domination, played over a tremolo-picked riff that would find its place on any Darkthrone album, mixed with deep gutturals that are simply terrifying and a bass line that makes you tremble with fear. An atmosphere is conjured as if you were in the bottom of a deep dark cave, ready to be sacrificed alive to the Little Horn himself. The chorus is repeated as if a ritual black mass was being recited and the drums keep on pounding with double bass and cymbal crashes over a haunting riff, until a thundering roar finally brings the song to an end.

What the hell was that??? Did I just make contact with the forces of darkness? Have I summoned Cthulhu himself into my room? Holy crap! Wait a minute…there’s eight more songs on this album. I don’t want to repeat that eight more times…or do I?!

Yes I do, as the massive riff that starts “I Sing His Words” grabs me by the neck like those little monsters from the Alien movies, the ones that lay eggs in your throat so that an Alien then rips your chest wide open. If you haven’t understood it with all the analogies I made so far then I’ll just tell you plain and simple, this album is scary! It transforms a sunny day into total bleakness and has an atmosphere that could make any black metal band shrug their shoulders with vile contempt. The riffs are from the Floridian death metal school and they’re some of the best I’ve heard, which is saying a lot considering this is an Israeli band. The album keeps pounding your head with great drum fills that serve as a backbone for all the cool riffs that Davidov lays in front of your ears. It’s amazing to realize that it’s Davidov who plays all the instruments here, because this feels more like a five member band rather than a two-piece. Keyboards are used here and there to provide for atmosphere, like the church bells and choirs on “Sonne Adam”, the northern winds blowing on “Take Me Back To Where I Belong” or the burning fires of “Transformation”. These enhance even more the already claustrophobic atmosphere present here.

The album is always kept at a slow to mid-paced rhythm and rarely increases its speed, rather being contempt with just crushing and trampling you over like a demolition ball, slowly balancing to your inevitable demise. A dark and creepy interlude composed of a distorted and dissonant riff lays the ground for one of the more devastating songs in the album, the aforementioned “Take Me Back To Where I Belong”. This song runs you over like a bulldozer, wreaking havoc and devastating all in its path. It then gives you a small chance to breathe before it buries you again under a pile of rubble, slowly taking away all the hope you had of possibly surviving. The chorus announces the impending doom and you now realize that the unfathomable depths are going to consume you. There’s some use of pinch harmonics on this song, something widely used by Incantation which is in fact another name that strikes me as a clear influence to this band.

The drums on this album are just brilliantly executed. There’s limited use of blasting and double bass, and as such it feels like they’re always used in the right places. The playing is tight and perfectly executed and the writing is on par with the quality of the guitar riffs. This is showcased perfectly on the next tracks, “Through Our Eyes Hate Will Shine” and “I Claim My Birth In Blood” with their bombastic drumming, great fills and constant tempo changes. The recurrent combination of different playing techniques throughout the album keeps it constantly mutating in form and shape, never boring you in the process. That also makes it harder to describe its sound. Take Incantation’s Onward To Golgotha and strip it of its brutal use of drums, add some atmosphere worthy of Evoken, play it over Winter’s Into Darkness with Trey Azagthoth handling the guitars, sprinkle with a bit of Disembowelment’s weirdness over Lost Paradise’s distorted anthems, and finish with a combo of early Nick Holmes, Craig Pillard and Nocturno Culto (circa Soulside Journey) on the vocals. And even that probably won’t describe everything that’s happening here!

I have to mention the production on this album because it’s just superb. Drums, guitars and bass all have room to breathe with none of them overpowering the other. The bass sound is very similar to that on Incantation’s early albums providing for a really thick low-end. The production captures perfectly one of the most proficiently played and amazingly composed soundscapes that I’ve heard in a long time, but at the same time retains that gritty tone that was achieved on the classic albums from the early nineties. This is something that the band describes as intentional, having spent a lot of time with their producer and friend Eli Pivoker, trying out different configurations over and over again so that it would sound perfectly morbid. Death metal bands around the world take notice, this is how a death metal album should sound! At all times organic and with a warm feel from all the instruments, with every instrument having its proper place in the mix and being perfectly audible at all times. But at the same time still capable of immersing you in a cold and grim atmosphere, one that only fades away with the end of the album.

I’ve elongated myself a bit in the writing process of this review, but alas it’s not every day that I hear an album that grabs my attention like Transformation did. If this album had been released twenty years ago during the death/doom explosion it would’ve been labeled as a classic. So being released now only makes it an even more amazing and haunting work of art, considering that few bands play like this today. This album is monstrous and scary, it’s filthy and rotten to the core, it’s dark and atmospheric, and it has more good riffs than some bands could ever write in an entire career. Ultimately this is one of the best albums I’ve heard, not only in the latest years but certainly in my life. This is the Soulside Journey or the Onward To Golgotha of the 21st century, brought to us by a band that will certainly be around for a long time. My biggest doubt was whether to give this a perfect score or not, and trust me I was tempted to do so. In the end I find that 9.5 is the most suitable score because despite being an amazing album I still think there’s room for the band to improve, and if they build their future on such a high-quality debut I can assure you that the next album will rattle the very foundations of the metal world. If this one doesn’t do that already!

By: Júlio Valada