Divinativa

Two years after Vibromancy, which had achieved to draw attention and take my expectations to the higher level, Sacerdos, the weird duo from the United States return with their second full length album called “Divinativa”. This album was released in February of 2014 and it contains three tracks of overall duration of about twenty five minutes. Here, Sacerdos present us Black Metal of somehow different kind of style than that that they had presented us in their previous album. That means that the listener will come across more atmospheric with a lot of changes Black Metal combined with intense ambient elements in this one too.

Generally, the band is oriented to a more ambient philosophy both regarding the obvious ambient elements, which are a lot more into this album, but also regarding the composing of the riffs and the way that they present the atmosphere and the images that they create. The riffs are simple and minimal, mainly of slow tempo, melodic and combined with the intense ambient elements they put out a heavy and dark atmosphere and the images from space landscapes. The tracks are long concerning their duration and their evolving is slow. Also their structure, although it has changes into the riffing and the atmosphere, it doesn’t help the evolving of the tracks. Finally, the many ambient elements and their quite repetitive structure make the tracks tedious for the listener.

On the contrary to those that I mentioned above, the band has done in this album too a very nice job concerning the sound quality. The production is bass and clean and it delivers a very warm, almost hypnotic sound. The mixture is very balanced highlighting the elements that should be highlighted depending on the part. The guitars have a clean and loud sound, they are played with accuracy and they deliver the images and the atmosphere flawlessly. The bass fills the compositions well without playing the first role anywhere. I don’t know if the drums come from a drum machine but their sound is good. Their lines are simple, without many changes, but stable enough, they fill the sound well. The keyboards are used into the ambient parts of the album but also into the tracks in a lot of parts, giving an atmospheric character to the music. The vocals are heavy, dirty, fuzzy vocals, quite monotonous and without anything of interest. Finally, the lyrics are contained into the cd and they describe dark stories with ancient gods and destruction.

Summarizing, I think that the second full length album of Sacerdos is worse than the first one regarding the quality. Here the band has lost the balance between Black Metal and ambient, so that the compositions to be quite boring. Moreover, the harsh, straightforward character that we had come across in the previous one, has been replaced by a Black Metal of a new style of atmospheric, melancholic one, which has not been delivered as it should have been in order to be interesting. Generally I don’t believe that “Divinativa” is a good album, nor that it has anything to offer to the listener. Avoid.