Sabïre - JÄTT

Angry Metal Guy 30

I know we complain about promo sheets every so often around here. It’s a base necessity to vent our discontent for the sake of our sanity. We do become inoculated against minor offenses; talking big is expected, and misrepresenting the music is often the result of an overworked intern at the label hearing two minutes of a single and pounding out a blurb before his first round of coffee-fetching.¹ But especially egregious examples warrant a round of the stocks with a basket of rotting fruit and eggs. Presenting, ex-Canadian Australian Scarlett Monastyrski and his band Sabïre, finally releasing his ‘much anticipated’ debut JÄTT a whole 14 years after he first got the idea.

You see, the promo sheet makes a big show of Sabïre bucking conventional genres. Monastyrski ‘simply played what came naturally on guitar,’ and developed it into something he dubbed ‘acid metal.’ It even calls Sabïre a ‘band with a hellbent determination to be different, break the mold, and shake up the status quo.’ For something made with such a strong desire to be unique, though, it really sounds an awful fucking lot like Monastyrski is imitating W.A.S.P. or Riot. I feel like the Scooby Doo gang, ripping the mask off acid metal and exclaiming: ‘It’s Old Man Trad!’²

Jätt by Sabïre

If you saw the W.A.S.P. name-drop and immediately started pointing and screaming “GLAM!” like you’re Donald Sutherland (R.I.P.) in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you’re not entirely wrong, as it’s definitely part of the band’s DNA, with the simple, straightforward riffs and anthemic choruses. Now, glam gets a bad rep which isn’t entirely undeserved, but Sabïre does try to mend some of the genre’s usual shortcomings. The music is not over-polished, and the faster songs even dare to get a little thrashy (“Pure Fucking Hell,” “Rip Rip KILL!!!”³). The vocals eschew most of the cheese-laden poppiness and retain a bit of bite, and though the songwriting pretty much follows all the tropes from the 80’s down to the details, they’re executed well enough to make for an enjoyable if unremarkable bit of nostalgia.

Except JÄTT approaches morbid obesity with a 70-minute runtime. That’s at least double the runtime it should have been, even when all the songs had been bangers, and they are not. Sabïre is not awful when the pacing is high, but when it goes down, so does any semblance of quality. “Ice Cold Lust” is what you get when you leave a KISS record in a bag with an old banana for a week. “Chained Down” is an excruciating mid-paced exercise in patience, with a chorus as dull as a brick painted in that green color Disney uses for its trashcans. Follow-up “The Shadow in my Heart” opens as a deeply awful ballad that just about makes me want to sink the entire continent of Australia beneath the waves, though the second half is not half as bad. The incredibly bloated intro, intermission, and outro total 10 minutes by themselves and add nothing at all.

I might’ve been tempted to pick the best tracks off for a playlist and ignore the rest, if it weren’t for the production, which seems to aim for retro and overshoots its target, landing on “no budget in the early 60’s.” Everything is drowned in enough reverb it might as well have been recorded in a sewage pipe, and there’s an aggravating crackle and pop present throughout the album. Along with the insufferable bloat and tired songwriting, it kills any interest I may have had in JÄTT. There is talent among the performers in Sabïre, I won’t deny that. But it’s not often the distance is this large between the promo sheet, with its inflated self-importance, distorted sense of innovation, and utter lack of self-reflection, and the actual product, whose at-a-glance serviceability is quickly and thoroughly eroded on full and repeat exposure.

Rating: 1.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Listenable Records
Websites: sabireacid7.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/sabireacidmetal
Releases Worldwide: June 28th, 2024

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