Album review: Siniestro “Vortexx”
Swedish-Chilean blackened thrash metal with death metal and punk influences and a few surprising musical twists and turns.
The record label describes Siniestro as Swedish-Chilean blackened thrash metal. With such a description I know that, even before listening to a single song, I no doubt will find this duo’s album very interesting. The duo, formed in 2012, has a Northern European/South American fire-and-ice kind of dynamic to its music. Hot and cold and freaking furious. I love it. It’s angry yet melodic. It’s fast and heavy. It’s at times primitive yet often complicated and technical. A couple of the tracks are sung in Swedish. Those tracks, “Blod eld död” and “Den svartaste flamman och renaste hat”, are a bit different musically from the tracks sung in English. They sound like they have a fair bit of Swedish punk influences in them. “Vortexx”, the band’s second full-length album, is quite varied. It includes two instrumental pieces – “Hiisi” (an acoustic flamenco-style guitar piece) and “My Innermost Sun” (a piece seemingly played on a church organ) – which both further add to the variety of musical styles that Siniestro performs with excellence. “Escape by Death” is a splendid song that takes the band into a dense death metal forest. The hard-hitting tracks “One Last Bullet, One Last Ride” and “Buried in the Bog” are among my favourites on this terrific album. But the almost ten-minute long “Anti Human Commando” is the standout track for me. It’s an epic piece of music that has everything that I love about Siniestro: heaviness, speed, melodies, razor-sharp riffs, pissed-off vocals and plenty of raw and dirty energy.
Siniestro’s album “Vortexx” will be released on 14th May via Black Lodge Records.
