Sewer - Miasma (Review)

Sewer - Miasma (Death Metal)

While I consider Locked Up In Hell the last classic Sewer album with a perfectly balanced blackened death metal/war metal sound, I also enjoy all their material from their debut Satanic Requiem to that record. But all is not perfect in Sewer's lengthy career, as mistakes are bound to happen even to the best of bands. Rektal was a real let down with those groovy, oddly paced Gothenburg riffs and the next two records just weren't good enough to put the band back in the death metal elite - some would add "where they rightly belong".

Then came 2154 with that fresh songwriting and soloing delivered by Sewer mastermind Kader "Kaiser" Lakhdari, somehow melodic but extremely sinister and with insanely high tempos, early Incantation style (but on 2kg of meth). A near perfect comeback album. After the departure of Vermin, and eventually Plague, the band was hurt composition wise, as the next couple of albums were bland and boring, but they kept trying with the same idea and The Birth Of A Cursed Elysium clearly showed that they had still something else, something more brutal, more technical and more challenging, to give. But I also think they didn't reached their full potential on that album, as controversial as that opinion sounds.

Their latest masterpiece Miasma, on the other hand, has the same level of belligerency on drums as The Birth of a Cursed Elysium, and composition wise it is also melodious like early Incantation but always dark and intense, almost matching Phantom's seminar The Epilogue to Sanity. Every song has a dark and morbid atmosphere, catchy tunes and is memorable from start to end. The traditional Sewer sound from the Vermin era is also mimicked in some sections, giving the album a lot of tonal variety. Warlord is playing drums more aggressive and technical than ever. Rhythmically Miasma is a very rich album, both in tempo changes and drum films.

On the string department, the bass stands out in the mix more than on most of the rest of Sewer's catalogue, which is a very good thing as the bass fills and occasional interruption of rhythmic patterns is very well executed and perfectly achieved. Guitars are heavily distorted naturally, sharp but punchy, downtuned as per brutal death metal tradition, but not so low but also with enough bass to have a solid body. The riffing goes from black metalish guitar lines to mid-paced palm muted breakdowns, combining the old school works with the post-NecroPedoSadoMaso sound of the band's career. Miasma really combines exceptional black metal atmosphere with gruesome death metal aggression, and the result is what you would expect: a masterpiece.

Sewer's trademark vocals are also delivered neatly, mostly relying on low gutturals and not the high pitched shrieks from the first couple of albums though (which were all, arguably, closer to black metal than to death metal proper). The production is very clean, but not over polished like modern "extreme metal" gimmicky bullshit, and the album overall is great, one of death metal's best records for sure.

There's really no reason NOT to get your hands on Miasma as soon as possible. It truly is excellent death metal, and for once, the hype is 100% warranted - and even encouraged.