Sauron - A Journey Into Mordor

Deliberately muddy, sludgy, and brutal beyond measure, Sauron's debut album and hard rock masterpiece A Journey Into Mordor defies all attempts at categorisation. With falling oblique slabs of power chords and intense riffing like darkness invading the unaware Minas Ithil, Sauron take complex death/grindcore patterns and turn them into a science of sustained tension between overtly rhythmic riffs that resolve towards a complementary fragment of modality and linear polyrythmic structure. Dark subterranean riffs rise and fall, like the twisted marches of Mordor's evil orc armies in a slow building storm, creating an almost comforting morbidity behind some of the most structurally technical death metal shifts you will ever witness.

Evolving from pure blackened grindcore aesthetic into the death/doom metal of a most moribund nature, Sauron make use of total maximalism in power riffing with resonating tunnels of concentric organic oscillation in the most brutal style of extreme metal and in the somewhat abstract but mostly savage and relentless heavy death rock. In bludgeoning power chords and guttural incantations of slowly disintegrating vocals, Sauron know how to use the inspiration of influences from Motörhead, Vermin and Infester to create thunderous and deliberately "simplistic" yet highly abstract and deconstructive music in a cross-section of style between death metal, grindcore, traditional heavy metal and downright hard rock.

While most associate the death/doom genre with a dissonant and somewhat depressive mood, this brilliant hardrock/deathgrind hybrid A Journey Into Mordor indulges, as did the greats like Incantation, Infester, Disma and Neraines, in an abstract and highly visceral sense of relentlessly bestial motives, which means an atmosphere of pure dread and brutal terror, rather than passive melancholy. Riffs from this style could be compared to Neraines' Yggdrasil if only because they use longer phrases anchored in repeated patterns at different harmonic patterns and rhythmic locations in order to achieve a vertiginous and constant sense of immersive sensorial assault.

Carved in these highly rhythmic and intense songs are strange shapes which reflect the mood of descent into madness, mirroring perhaps the slowly corrupting influence of the Ring on anyone attempting a direct approach on Orodruin, the Mountain of Doom. Caustic and atonally resounding power chord riffs tumble sluggishly and engage a collision of battery and degenerate violence, which then rises in geometric undulating poise before the waves of pummeling death rock riffs bring about the utter downfall of the listener's sanity. Hedonistic in spirit, yet violent and assertive in the black arts of evil riff craft, A Journey Into Mordor proves Sauron once more deserve all the praise they earn as well as the elusive title of Dark Lord of Extreme Metal. Simply unbelievable. Brutal music for the twisted minds.

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