95%
Sayyadina—The Great Northern Revisited (2010)
Details
Tracks 1 to 8 recorded at Mart’s House, Tumba on 24 February 2001; engineered by Mart Hallgren. Tracks 9 to 17 recorded at Studio Sunlight, Stockholm from 2 to 8 September 2001; engineered by Tomas Skogsberg. Tracks 19 to 30 recorded at Studio Sunlight, Stockholm from 16 to 19 February 2002; engineered by Tomas Skogsberg. Mastered by Scott Hull. Released on Relapse Records.
Band
- Jon Lindqvist—Guitars and vocals
- Andreas Eriksson—Bass and vocals
- Ove Wiksten—Drums and vocals
Tracks
- Nothing
- Prozac generation
- The revenge
- The awakening
- Their control
- Min onda bän
- Instrumental
- Instrumental
- Someday I will kill
- Sort them out
- From ashes
- När fag faller
- Black rose
- Mid livet som insats
- Swallow
- All this fear
- Downfall
- Civilized control
- Retaliation
- Civilization
- Automation
- Compulsion
- Stagnation
- Confrontation
- Outrage
- Oppression
- Future digits
- Razor discipline
- Solitude
- Last days make the least
Review
I’m quite sure what it says about my personality that I find this kind of music unusually relaxing. Perhaps it’s simply that genres like grindcore contain a lot of white noise: “a consistent noise that comes out evenly across all hearable frequencies” (Source: Popular science).
Sayyadina (which means “friend of God” in Chakobsa, a fictional language used by the Fremen people of the Dune universe) are a grindcore band from Sweden, and are rather oddly not featured at all on Metal Archives.
This collection gathers together six individual releases, (a combination of individual and split 7″ EPs, LPs and CDs) as well as a handful of unreleased tracks. The sleeve notes documents the releases, offering insights and anecdotes about the recording sessions.
The music, rather inevitably, is brutal. A wall of guitar and bass, thrashing and changing direction on a whim; drums and cymbals that sound like a bag of jangling cutlery; vocals that are grunted and screamed. I shouldn’t like it, but it works.
The songs are short, between 12 seconds and 2′ 29″. And there are a lot of them.
Any discussion about grindcore would be incomplete without at least a passing reference to the godfathers of grindcore, Napalm Death. So that was it.
Conclusion
These is little to criticise about this release. It has just about everything you would want from a grindcore album. If you’re into early Napalm Death and haven’t checked these guys out then I urge you to do so now; listent to it on their Bandcamp page.
Review score: 95%