Sawthis - _Egod_
(Scarlet Records, 2009)
by: Aly Hassab El Naby (5 out of 10)
Almost a year ago, I was doing an internship at a small company here in Cairo. The whole staff was under ten people, with half of them looking for a better job. One of the guys, who's been there for five years now, told me something that I'll probably never forget. He said: "The longer you stay at a place, the deeper you sink in it." This quotation, on the face of it, doesn't seem relevant to an album review, but stay with me for a while. The album of which I speak is _Egod_ by the Italian group Sawthis; a band that sounds like it has done some sinking, but not quite enough. The good qualities of their musical elements are there and are detectable, but they sound far apart.Let's take the second track "Act of Sorrow" as an example. If you extract that first riff and listen to it on its own, it may not sound very impressive. But when you give it the correct distortion tone and add that meticulously punctuated drum line to it, it sounds great. Unfortunately, they didn't leave it at that. They had to add these generic clean vocals over them, which in my opinion were a poor choice. The following track "Barabba" is another example of taking a good bunch of screams and riffs with a rather pronounced Mediterranean influence and figuratively pissing all over them with an utterly cheesy clean vocals chorus. I could go on with the same approach with "A. B. Senses" and "Twonity", but you get the point.Sawthis have a collection of ideas from both sides of the equator. In the future, putting more effort into riff selection and taking more time during the composition phase could have the band putting out a stronger follow-up to _Egod_. In summarizing, if the third album by Sawthis has less "Barabba", better or no clean vocals and more moments like "Stain" and the first riff in "Act of Sorrow", then we could be in for a pretty interesting ride. But as far as _Egod_ goes, it would strongly depend on your tolerance regarding the clean vocals and the metalcore-ish production.
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