SATURNINE - Mors Vocat LP (Black Vinyl)

Saturnine are an excellent addition to the ever growing family of deathy, black tinged doom bands out there right now. They provide the listener here with just under 40 minutes of melody tinged organic sludge that's hard not to like. The core aspects of their sound are a positively rumbling low end on the rhythm section that shakes my room whenever I blast the LP, layered on top with dark melody and hoarse bellowing vocals.

What's vastly impressive about this first full length is how accomplished and balanced it feels. Songwriting is excellent, with the tracks having a true sense of progression throughout each song, with little feeling repetitive or tired. Also the sonics of their sound are fantastically sharply tuned. It's easy to have a sense of inadvertent overpowering in this kind of 'slow and as loud as logically plausible' kind of music, but the sound is very balanced. It shakes you to your core but never feels like just a racket of feedback, it's more that the music is rich but extremely loud.

The best way I can describe the band, and something that perpetually keeps bouncing into my head is organic. This band feel like they are writing music that is timeless in a certain manner, like it could have been written in any era of metal and stood up in the crowd. The character of the music is never lost in a sense of cacophony, but it keeps that characteristic of loudness and vitality and life throughout. The way the songs flow makes this sense of the music being full of life even more prominent, as each song develops in it's own specific way, melodies intertwining with the hammering reverberating riffage to give this feeling of like you're following the song as it travels.

I know this sounds like a bunch of waffle, and it kind of is, but it's the best way I can describe how this record makes me feel. It feels like something you spend time with and enjoy getting to know, not just background tracks to whatever you're doing or 'one or two fun tracks that you like the sound of'. It's got this character all of its own and this fabulous flow throughout where everything just makes sense. The band have recorded some fabulous tracks and anything off this record would sound fantastic on its own, but as a single piece of music it's even more powerful than one of its parts.

The band also have a great sense of the importance of urgency and aggression in heavy music, and therefore never let a song just drone on for another 4 minutes when it's time to hit the next track and the next phase of the record. One criticism I have of most death/doom/black bands is that sometimes they'll just overindulge themselves on one track or a few and inadvertently or in some cases intentionally make a record hard to initially digest by doing that. Don't expect that from Saturnine. This is punchy and sure of it's self despite the unavoidably wallowing and plodding nature of their chosen musical style.