Sentenced - North From Here
Review: The flowingest melodic lines and harmonies traced through adversarial declensions of cyclic variable sound, this is pure melodic composition within the hybrid of death metal and Iron Maiden styled harmonizing NWOBHM. Emphasis on motion and intricacy in riffing with speed metal touches such as picked-up riffs and tumbling structures build a secure backdrop to this unfolding scene.
In these songs straight black metal phrasing combines with complex death metal structure and gains just enough of the stop-slam architecture of speed metal to come up with a powerful and almost delicate, yet not effete, sound. Lead guitar descends from neoclassical hard rock and blistering late 1970s heavy metal with solidly chosen notes and figures avoiding the repetition and contextless circularity of most metal soloing. Deft drumming invoked on the previous album folds itself into music here with a tacit purpose of being unnoticed except as consistency of background detail to stage the scene for appropriately more varied tones and textures in lead instruments.
Flesh of living music in the creative redirections and alert fingering of lightning riffs imbues the album as a whole with spirit and makes it a listening experience that more than the sum of its parts, is the abstraction of intent arising from the amalgamation and in that a direction unseen by many in metal. True enough: the genre of "melodic Swedish metal" exploded after this release and continues strong with its heavy metal/melodic death metal hybrid, but few have touched the start that these deranged Finns gave to the style.