SINISTER – Diabolical Summoning (Remastered)

With the remastering of the first four Sinister albums, Metal Mind Records reminds everyone the true nature of Old School Death Metal. The Dutch based Sinister is over twenty years of age and its deathly core is alive and well. This review presents you a time or ,to be more exact ,an era when Old School Death Metal was still playing with its own wretched dirty crib , a time when Death Metal became more than just a small movement as it rose to become a strong sub-genre alongside its three other brothers, Heavy Metal , Power Metal and Thrash Metal.

Diabolical Summoning is one of Sinister’s respectable accomplishments in the 1990s period of their career. In comparison to their debut release, Cross The Styx, various changes were made in order to accelerate Sinister’s uprising power into unknown boundaries. The first modification was in the line of their production. The band used the services of Colin Richardson, who made their music extra crunchy, heavyweight, monstrous and bloody as an unbelievable bloodbath. After rolling this one a couple of times you might hear the band’s influences that range from early to mid era of Sodom to the other deadliest acts of Death Metal such as Morbid Angel , early Cannibal Corpse, old Suffocation , Deicide and the undeniable Death , which was a sound base to loads of Death Metal bands that arose through the late 1980s to the mid 1990s.

When it comes to the second transformation in Sinster’s approach, you may observe the material. Unlike the Cross The Styx album, Diabolical Summoning’s music is more or less sophisticated than before. The riffs are somewhat more complex, the solos are short yet interesting with lots of vigor and the drum work is amazing with malicious nasty grinds and bulldozer crushing bass drum. Well not everything is that far fetched or perfect – Sinister, in that epoch of time, still lacked the sense to be more assorted with their music. There are ultra identical features, also in structure, between songs such as “Sense Of Demise” and “Magnified Wrath”. Furthermore, the superfluous usage of drum grinds is remarkable, yet at times, it seems that Sinister tended to use them repeatedly. This extra usage, in a way, created a small black shade over their cool massive riffs.

Diabolical Summoning will give you an idea about the dark side of Old School Death Metal with bits of Satanic themed songs and menacing music to get ready to explode with some gutsy tunes such as: “Diabolical Summoning” – The one with the true heaviness. “Sadistic Intent” and “Sense Of Demise” – Won’t let you rest with their morbidity. “Desecrated Flesh” – The true nature of the flesh , the Death Metal version. “Tribes Of The Moon” – Has the best solo on this wretched town of an album under its dark halo.

Metal Mind Records, with this release , as in all the other Sinister albums , gave you a glimpse of Sinister’s live endeavors with two additional songs of wrath. In addition, there is the re-mastering and re-arranging of the album. As always Metal Mind did a flawless job on making this release a memorable piece of Metal history.

Sinister is still up and running today and they’re flying under the colors of Massacre Records , be sure to tune in to their newer stuff , it’s like not the old days, yet it will satisfy your hunger for good old Death Metal.