Arson Cafe: Tiamat - Sumerian Cry Review

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Tiamat - Sumerian Cry Review

From the ashes of the more prolific Treblinka, now legendary Tiamat formed in 1989 and as soon as 1990 had their debut full length album Sumerian Cry created already. This is the first release to be recorded at Sunlight Studio, earlier than Entombed's Left Hand Path, even though the latter was actually released first.

At this stage, the band hand’t taken the turn towards more gothic metal patterns that happened later, 1994 with Wildhoney and on, but instead maintained a more extreme character very much in line with a lot of bands of its time that changed afterwards. Not shying away from growls and slow-paced, doom death metal, Sumerian Cry often borrows from early black metal for its riff sections, but it’s not as clear as you would point it today. This illustrates the state of the underground scene at the time, which had much less well defined boundaries between genres still, and Tiamat were also by no means a pure Swedish death metal band either.

With a chalky production and based on not flawless but organic sound, Sumerian Cry would have been one hell of an interesting album to listen to at the time and still stands well in terms of enjoyment, even if it doesn’t really impress as much as classics of the early 90’s now. Johan Edlund’s vocals are one of the best aspects of the record, as are the sparse, agile solos of the tracks, which are otherwise built upon simplistic but hefty riffs with not a lot of variations. Often times though, only the drumming is a little bit underwhelming as it doesn’t hit hard enough to live up to the aggressive intentions of the rest of the composition. A bluesy, rock’n’roll xylophone session appears in “Evilized” which is the most unexpected moment in Sumerian Cry, which is appreciated even if it is, strictly speaking, out of place.

Solid tracks, all with wonderful macabre lyrics of underground metal, are “The Malicious Paradise”, “Apotheosis of Morbidity” and “Where the Serpents Ever Dwell”. All in all, Sumerian Cry has a warm 90’s sound, innocent mistakes that make it unique, and the contents of a hungry young band with a bright future. An acceptable start.

DAMAGE: 3.25/5

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Reckoning

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.