Speed and aggression all in good measure…
Released on 30 December 2017 by More Hate Productions and reviewed by Stephen Brophy
Hailing from Latvia, four piece thrash/speed metallers Saintorment have recently unleashed their new album, Defective Mind, on an unsuspecting public. This one is a piledriver of crunching riffs and absolutely pummelling drums from start to finish. When really pushing it they have quite an aural assault going on here which pushes the music into a more extreme area. Right from the off ‘Physical Force’ sets you up for a Thrashfest. The tracks all have a slightly different feel to them and the addition of a break in the speed and aggression every now and then really helps deliver here. ‘Never’, for example, is a much slower track, the vocals making a big change in delivery, but it’s still powerful in a different way.
Highlights are the excellent ‘Strong Enough’, the overpowering title track ‘Defective Mind’ – which sounds like a bulldozer and would be interesting to see live – and the aforementioned ball crusher that is ‘Physical Force’ that rarely lets up at all. This band is at its finest when they are playing balls-out thrash metal, it just all seems to fit when they are fast as lightning, which is just as well as it happens quite a lot.
This one definitely came out too late for the reckoning at the end of 2017, but it’s a fine album of straight out thrash and speed metal. It’s also got a more modern sound to it. There are a lot of bands these days that just seem to be purely interested in recreating the sound of the classic era so this is fairly refreshing. That’s not to say it hasn’t got a lot of classic elements in there because it does and they are balanced very well. One that could easily have slipped through the net, give it a spin if you love thrash. It should fit in nicely.
Track list:
- Physical Force
- Defective Mind
- We Are
- Strong Enough
- Never
- Zerofy
- …Dies At The Black Night
- Mood Pyexia
- Final Hour
- Ai, kā man patīk
