Sickening Horror
When Landscapes Bled Backwards

They are unknown, and perhaps very few will read this review, but if there's someone out there who loved the spirit of experimentation in late '80s and early '90s metal, and if those people loved the great progressive death metal bands like Cynic, Atheist, and Death, well, this review is directed to all of you who, like me, have a passion for music that can be both intelligent and wild.

Formed in 2002 in Athens, Greece, Sickening Horror only released their first full-length in 2007, after a 2003 demo. This "When Landscapes Bled Backwards" thus represents the first step in their career, but it immediately presents itself as a mature, dark, and extremely complex work.

The compositions, twelve in total, are all instrumentally very complex, with well-defined and extremely sophisticated guitar riffs, fast and precise solos (always on guitar), which occasionally seem borrowed from some jazz musician, and an extremely elaborate rhythmic base rich in tempo changes and tight sections, with drums almost always played in a double bass drum.

What distinguishes this band from the sacred monsters of the genre is, however, the vocal setting, decidedly derived from the death tradition, without the use of clean vocals, filtered parts, or anything else, giving the music that touch of primordial malignancy that more than one release in this musical style lacks.

Each composition is of medium-short duration, with extremes ranging from one minute for the intro "Descending The Mind's Abyss" to 3 minutes and 59 seconds for "Embrace The Abstract": precisely the choice to compose short pieces makes the album much more direct and accessible to the listener, who, however, to understand it thoroughly, needs to have the lyrics (dealing with themes such as loneliness, paranoia, despair, and surrealistic themes), so as to reach a real connection with the entire record.

Citing individual tracks from the album at this point seems almost impossible because, aside from all being of practically similar quality, they all maintain more or less the same elaborate but never verbose style, which always tends to showcase, at alternating moments in each track, the band's more violent side (well highlighted in "An Eerie Aspect Of Us... Drowning"), perfectly fused with the technical aspect, so as to highlight the individual qualities of each band member.

We can therefore say, in conclusion, that we are faced with a work of undeniable quality, elegant and at the same time wild, rich in that primitive violence that characterized early death metal, all reworked in a personal way, but without overturning the style's standards.

 P.S. To anyone who loved Atheist, "Virus Detected" is dedicated, an instrumental with a death/jazz stamp in which the influence of the American band is very clear.

Track-list

      1) Descending The Mind's Abyss
2) An Eerie Aspect Of Us...Drowning
3) This Cold Funeral
4) The Perfect Disease
5)Imprisoned In Apocalypse
6) Forsake My Bleeding
7) Dark One Surreality
8) Virus Detected
9)Filming Our Graves
10) Embrace The Abstract
11) All Perceived Nothing
12) When Landscaped Bled Backwards

 Line-up

George Antipatis - vocals and guitar
Ilias Daras - bass
George Kollias - drums