After slaying the world with North From Here, Sentenced reverted to the Iron Maiden and Queenrsyche side of the equation, trying to come up with a hard rockin’ version of death metal, in the process turning off most of their fans.
However, if taken as a heavy metal album instead, Amok offers an interesting melodic journey that comes by its quirks honestly, unlike most of what followed. The label issued the following statement:
Changes with every step…
The Finns of Sentenced are a band that presented themselves in a new stylistic guise with almost every release in the first years of their existence. From the extreme Finnish Ur-Death-Metal formation of the early days to the end of their career, the band’s path was quite changeable.
Especially on the album “Amok” presented here, the band once again reinvented themselves and created a long player that was groundbreaking for their further development.With “Nespenthe”, for which an elaborate video clip was also shot, the band created their first big hit, which was also noticed outside the then manageable metal cosmos through airplay and thus paved a new path for the band.
Tracklist
01. The War Ain’t Over!
02. Phenix
03. New Age Messiah
04. Forever Lost
05. Funeral Spring
06. Nespenthe
07. Dance On The Graves (Lil’ Siztah’)
08. Moon Magick
09. The Golden Stream Of Lapland
Tags: Heavy Metal, sentenced
of all the albums to revisit
Damn I love this style. Opening riff like a track straight out of UN Squadron or the Top Gun OST. Please recommend more.
Interestingly, the shitfest band that is Nightwish stole about half their riffs from this album.
I remember scrolling the television channels aeons ago, and one of the kids on Home Imrovement was wearing an Amok shirt!
I think there was some kind of synergy between Tenkula and Jarva that made this band special.
Even thugh this album as a whole falls far short of North From Here, it had a lot of moments that feel like Jon Nodtveit summoned something to take over Yngwie Mamsteen’s body. If that makes any sense at all.
Everything by Sentenced after Jarva left the band was basically just very skillfully played radio rock.
Jarva’s post-Sentenced work was a half-hearted attempt to ape Lemmy and/or Mika Luttinen.
It seems that neither musican was capable of creating anything memorable without the other.
I always say, “expanding on that” or “adding to that” which is a fancy way of saying yes and… most bands are this way.
Something magical happened on the first couple Incantation albums. Every great conductor has his preferred symphonies. Mayhem got it together for one great album, then turned into the a steady stream of the same forgettable that was on their first album. Slayer worked when driven by Hanneman, King, and Lombardo… not so much when that was fractured. People don’t like to admit it, but bands are corporations, and corporations require a balance of leadership skills to work, whether in one person or many.
Also bands just lose momentum over time. When the focus becomes being in the band, instead of making music that would impress the members of the band, you get managerial, bureaucratic style music. Amok strikes me as design-by-committee, even if more organic and less corporate than, say, later Immolation albums. What drove early Sentenced was the balance between sentiment and nihilism: the band expressed a yearning for intensity and meaning, but a fascination with the dark mechanisms of nature that seem to suggest the opposite. This is why North From Here worked so well built around the symbol of the Northern Lights: an absent God, meaningless life, and yet this weird beauty hinting at the infinity of possibility shows up every now and then. The band thought it was their alcoholism that helped, maybe, but really it was that sentiment, and the need to poise it on top of their hatred, misanthropy, and realism.