Sanctuarium - Melted and Decomposed

Angry Metal Guy

By: Nameless_n00b_85

Sanctuarium is a young band with an old, rotted soul. Beginning life as a one-man old-school death project, the outfit quickly expanded after its first demo into a two-man unit for its debut full-length, Into the Mephitic Abyss. This change shifted the band’s approach from straightforward OSDM into a more synth-drenched death/doom hybrid, heavy on atmosphere blending their doomy dirges in with mid-paced death. On their sophomore outing, Melted and Decomposed, the band has upped to a full five-piece and further evolved sound. With this stylistic shift and three new members, it remains to be seen if Melted and Decomposed innovates or not.

Good death/doom needs to have the sound to back up the music, and here Melted and Decomposed excels at its soundscape. This album sounds monstrous, with a thick, buzzsaw guitar tone that serves the death and doom elements equally well. Drummer Agus alternates between fills and flourishes, as the death riffs allow him to show his chops in snare abuse and creative fills, while the doom passages shift him into the background. Vocalist Carlos adds heaps of atmosphere with his performance, alternating between gutturals and prolonged, vaguely blackened screeches that are drowned in reverb and always seem to be cutting through from the back of the mix. The whole package sounds foul and is a real treat for lovers of that vintage OSDM sound. This time, however, Sanctuarium has opted to separate the ingredients of death and doom and offer them up in alternating layers instead of a proper blending of sounds. As a result, this is a mixed bag of an album, with its core approach to songwriting proving to be its biggest stumbling block.

Melted and Decomposed by Sanctuarium

When Sanctuarium focuses on playing proper death metal, they sound properly infected. Their approach is at times beatdown heavy, such as the ending of “Exultant Dredges of Nameless Tombs,” which features some of the album’s most creative drumming over a riff that Bongripper would be proud of. Elsewhere, “Phlegmatic Convulsions” sports stank-face-inducing riffs that glide forward like tanks and sports a midsection that sounds pulled straight from the Coffins playbook of grooves. It is in such moments that Sanctuarium is at its most lethal. While never approaching anything that could be considered “technical,” the death portions of every cut never lack energy and zeal.

Where the album struggles is when the band brings the music to a screeching halt. With every song clearing a minimum mark of eight minutes, each contains multiple doom passages that teeter on funeral doom pacing–single-note, single-snare-hit dirges that derail the momentum of any song. This approach is pervasive throughout the album—groovy, catchy, wonderful death riffs suddenly interrupted without warning by brake-slamming, overly sustained chords (for especially egregious examples, check out “Abhorrent Excruciation in Reprisal” and “Sadistic Cremation of Emaciated Offal”). There is no build up to such moments—nor a cathartic explosion after them—instead, they are treated like an afterthought, as if the band remembered they needed to put doom into the album to adhere to their sound, before moving right along to the next death riff. Frustratingly, the final minutes of the closing track “The Disembodied Grip of Putrescence” even show the band suddenly grasping at the last moment how to make doom work to serve the song structure rather than the other way around. All too late, the writing proves capable, vindicating their sandwiching approach. Unfortunately, no other song manages this balance, and the doom elements commit the greatest crime in metal music: being boring.

Ultimately, Melted and Decomposed is a curious listen. I’ve never heard an album at once hit such delightful highs and experience such abysmal failings, and within the same song.¹ The sound is excellent, the death metal elements strong, the atmosphere pervasive, and the doom doesn’t have to suck as hard as it does. Resuming the blended approach of their first album or improving the transitions and bridges between their divided song structures will let them unleash something truly putrid to the world on their next outing. Nevertheless, the death portions present an EP’s worth of genuine goodness, and lovers of all things audibly foul should investigate for themselves.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s CBR MP3
Label: Me Saco un Ojo Records
Websites: sanctuarium.bandcamp.com (old) | mesacounojo.bandcamp.com (current album)
Releases Worldwide: September 3rd, 2024

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