### Sanctification: Black reign

#### 20/10/09 || Lord K Philipson

Someone pointed out that it’s weird we haven’t covered “Black reign” up until now. I agree, I mean – we have this band at or forums and we featured them in July’s Audio Autopsy where they scored a well-deserved 2nd place after the masters of brutality – Vomitory. Somewhere between then and now we obviously forgot that this album deserves a regular review as well. I guess it’s my job to make it happen. There’s nothing like a slab of death metal at 05:30 in the morning. Yes, my neighbors love me.

A few years ago Sanctification proved they had ass-loads of potential when it comes to death metal, namely by releasing one of the worst albums ever production-wise. The material was there and the catchiness was there as well, all covered up in a fantastically crappy sound taking away the chances for the album to be remembered as an excellent recording on all accounts. Now it just showed a very promising band struggling to find the right path on all levels.

Exit “Misanthropic salvation”. Enter “Black reign”.

Playing it safe and entering Abyss Studios instead of whatever shithole they last used is ofcourse a smart move. Abyss is a guarantee for great, though at times somewhat soulless, productions, but it’s definitely a recipe for success considering the previous output’s sound. Bottomline; Sanctification and Abyss make for a nice gay couple, “Black reign” is proof to that.

So, here they are churning out a death metal affair that no one into death metal can deny liking. The Americanized style of Sanctification covers both the fast (mostly) and the heavy with guest vocal appearances by Emperor Magus Caligula of Dark Funeral and Peter Tägtgren of Hypocrisy/Pain/Abyss Studios. Kristoffer Hell replaced Molle for this album and he handles the vocals ok, nothing too exciting about them but they are fine. I prefer Molle’s vocals though. Upon finishing this recording Kristoffer decided to leave the band so he was replaced with, tada!, Emperor Magus Caligula (and some other guy playing bass, fuck if I care). And ofcourse, Sanctification also features Nils Äggström (at least on the album), one of the best death metal drummers around, from Dark Funeral (he was in Sanctification before DF though) so to say that you get “Deliverance” (the movie, not the Opeth album) feelings from the line up is not too far-fetched. I don’t even know if that made much sense, but hey…

So, to sum it up…

You get absolute high quality death metal with “Black reign”, an album that’s sporting a killer production (Nils always uses too triggered drums though the sound on this one is the best one he’s ever had) together with fine riffage-fests and enough groove to stand out a little in the death metal field of today. For being Swedish they sure sound anything but. There might be a little too much hyper double bass for the average human being considering there are fast blasts and double bass on every second riff. But if you can handle Morbid Angel I don’t see any problems for you handling Sanctification.

It sounds like I have nothing but praise for these guys, but that’s not true. I was never a huge fan of the American way of death metal, the backwards-blasts, the monotonous growls and so forth… This is where my affection for Sanctification gets a little punch in the vagina. I take Sanctification over pretty much any American death metal band, no doubt, but this specific style isn’t completely my cup of tea. Still there’s no denying the absolute precision these guys possess when it comes to executing flawless music of the br00tal kind, though it does get a bit repetitive in the long-run and it’s definitely kinda hard to separate the tracks from each other. Nonetheless, “Black reign” is a quality effort on all accounts, and in smaller doses it’s quite fantastic.

Oh, and I can’t let you go without mentioning the excellent album cover and the absolutely fantastic fucken opening riff of “Trucido Christianes”, from now on renamed “Trocadero Chinese”. That’s some great shit right there.

- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Pulverised Records
- Website: Sanctification MySpace
- Band
- Kristoffer Hell: vocals, bass
- Markus Edvardsson: guitars
- Tomas Elofsson: guitars
- Nils Fjällström: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Thirst For Blood
- 02. Black Reign
- 03. Raw
- 04. Eternal
- 05. Hear This
- 06. Dead Forever
- 07. Flesh, Bone And Skin
- 08. Trucido Christianes
- 09. Storm