Sadist

Crust

Displeased Records

Review by Vladimir Levin

Sadist's new album "Crust" comes to us from Displeased Records, purveyor of extreme underground acts such as Altar - favourably reviewed in an earlier issue of TOC. Displeased is a label from the Netherlands -- and that's quite an appropriate name given the brand of brutal and extreme music they put forth from the dark nether-regions of the earth...

The cover of the copy we received at TOC displays some sort of abstract mechanical monstrosity emerging from (or penetrating) something vaguely furry (hmmmm). As for what musical genre emerges from within the jacket of the CD, well I was certainly expecting the brutality and sickness that we've come to associate with Displeased.

Crust can best be characterized as a variety of disparate styles - punk beat structure, new age instrumentals, industrial, funk and a kind of blackened death metal - put through a blender to produce an uneasy, perhaps unnatural alliance - consider crossing a toad with a hamster...

Yes this album is indeed creepy and unsettling with its unbalanced musical structure. This effect is accentuated by the unearthly vocals just dripping with malignancy and truculence. While this effort by Sadist is definitely "different," I did not find Crust's blend of mild and extreme styles all that appealing. Perhaps this is due to the technical vs. emotional nature of the album. If you enjoy extreme music and you don't mind abrupt transitions from spacey synth orchestrations to prog-metal guitar solo flourishes to raspy black metal, then this album is for you.

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