This is good. This is really really good! In the evil kind of way, of course...
The Canadian trio Sympathy plays death metal. Simple as that. They don’t stick to a specific sub-genre of death metal – they seem perfectly at home everywhere. Which is quite impressive in itself. On top of that, they are all very good musicians. Very tight, very creative, every instrument adapted perfectly to it’s brethren. You know, the stuff that makes really good music. I’ll skip my normally prose-like lingual approach in this review, and do what Sympathy does: Simplify and deliver. No-bullshit-style:
Sympathy’s inspirational sources are many and as diverse as can be within the realm of extreme metal. The most obvious tribute goes to technical death metal bands like Necrophagia. The tempo-switches and abruptness of that genre is evident throughout Anagogic Tyranny, but clearest in songs such as “On a Bloodied Cross”. In the complete opposite direction we find reminiscences of symphonic black metal. “Underworld” could almost as easily have figured on a Dimmu Borgir-album, for example, except for Sympathy’s lead singer Derek From (who’s surname ironically translate into “pious” in Danish). He smites the audience with a ferocious voice, the kind of which I haven’t heard often enough. I can’t say if it is artificially distorted, but I don’t care either. It’s brutal, bordering on the animalistic, and in my ears that is great no matter how it is accomplished.
In between the tech metal and the symph metal we find the core of original death metal, in the song “Enslaved by Depravity”. It’s marvelously straight forward, well performed and run in a stunningly high tempo – and still perfectly tight.
This album is really a kind of grand tour of death metal, containing aggression that would leave Slayer panting for air.
Sympathy, I salute you!
