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Sayyadina

The Great Northern Revisited

Written by: PP on 04/05/2010 02:35:47

Featuring ex-members of prolific grindcore outfits Nasum and Victims, Sweden's Sayyadina certainly have their credentials in order. They've released two full lengths and appeared on a number of compilations before releasing "The Great Northern Revisited" a little while a go, a collection of tracks from past 7"s, compilations and unreleased material. It's a record that fireballs past you in just 35 minutes despite the scary amount of tracks on offer (29), so you should already know what's coming your way should you choose to give this disc a spin or two.

Sayyadina specialize in lightning speed thrash-grindcore, an imaginary genre that I just came up with in order to better describe just how these guys sound. You take a breakneck speed thrash band complete with angrily yelled vocals and a ton of shredding, give them a warp drive, and tell them to play some brutal grindcore. That's essentially how "The Great Northern Revisted" will come across to someone new checking the band out. Among the collection you have a bunch of insanely tight and fast grindcore pieces that will impress with their ferocity and technical prowess, but unfortunately the record overall suffers from a really inconsistent production job. To start out with, the drums sound completely flat and almost nonexistent in the mix, which is a shame 'cause the dude can smash some sick patterns with his kit occasionally. Secondly, there are too many tracks which are drowned into obscurity because of a shoe box-type production that leaves everything sounding chaotic and messy instead of tight and brutal, which has been the goal elsewhere on the record. Finally, the band's songwriting isn't quite consistent enough for me to award them a high rating, especially in light of other recent grindcore releases that have landed in our inbox (Wormrot's "Abuse" being the highlight at the moment).

But lets keep in mind that these are technically b-sides and unreleased stuff that never made it to the records, so lets not jump into any assumptions just yet, other than that you're probably better off checking out the 'official' full lengths first before diving head first into the unknown.

Download: Last Days Make The Least, Automation
For the fans of: Nasum, Victims, Napalm Death, Gadget
Listen: Myspace

Release date 16.03.2010
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