Day: December 23, 2015

With a little delay after the release, today we examine Burden by Belgian A Thousand Sufferings, a band that comes to the debut after a history that began only a few years ago. The musicians come mostly from the black metal scene of their country, so this heritage goes to merge with the doom creating a sulphurous mixture capable of emanating leaden and often depressive vapours. If we can speak of sludge, it’s certainly not in the classic terms of the genre: here, all in all, the riffs appear less insistent in the lror distortions, leaving the sound more dry and, sometimes, almost dark matrix. The work is relatively short, made up of three tracks of about ten minutes each (plus intro) and the intensity is never lacking, making this first test of A Thousand Sufferings definitely successful; in particular, the corrosive Red Is Redemption (Bloodletting) is very good and the darker Black Is Burden (Lamentation) is very enveloping, while the doom slowdowns in Blue Is… (Remembering Treasures). On the other hand, it cannot be denied that, even in this sector, it is no longer sufficient to compose only good records in order to emerge, otherwise you run the risk of being permanently caught in the indistinct mass of good bands but without the stigmata of the champion. With all this, nothing is to take away from these Belgian guys, who deserve a good grade, in the light of a convincing interpretation of a sludge black doom that, in their case, still seems to have discrete margins for manoeuvre.

2014 – Satanath Records