SilentScream213 Sabbat is a band who have been at the grind for a long time – never breaking through despite being at the forefront of the first wave of Black Metal. Part of this is probably because they were stuck in Japan, where their raw, Satanic, simple first-wave style never really took hold. They put out many unique, solid albums, but The Dwelling was a bit of a leap in terms of quality and musical depth.

The near hour long, single track of the album has their usual Blackened Thrash with tons of Heavy Metal influence, but it’s also loaded with a bunch of shifts and changes, both in tempo, instruments, and even vocal styles. The only consistency is the evil, occult obsession that permeates all of their material.

The Dwelling is a great collection of what makes Sabbat a strong band. They aren’t the most skilled, nor the fastest or heaviest, hell this is the first time I’d even call them good songwriters, but they just always had so much passion for this style of music. Almost every other band that started in the first-wave scene moved on with the times, but not Sabbat. They continued playing it until they felt comfortable creating what is essentially the only first-wave “epic” that pushes the boundaries of one of the most simple Metal styles into a progressive and multi-dimensional piece.

siLLy puPPy Extreme metal can be accredited to early 80s bands like Venom, Hellhammer and early Bathory each of which showcased a mix of proto-thrash, proto-black and proto-death metal styles before all the respective subgenera would splinter off into various directions. Japan’s SABBAT (as opposed to the English band of the same name) formed all the way back in 1983 and was heavily inspired by these bands, especially Venom and while all those bands would evolve as the 80s ceded into the 90s, SABBAT sorta maintained that evil as fuck mix of 80s speed metal, proto-thrash and first wave black metal.

For that reason i’ve never been a huge fan of this SABBAT but there are exceptions and the album i return to the most is this exquisitely designed hour long single track titled "The Melody of the Death Mask" which not only features a brilliant display of an ever-changing musical callithump of various musical styles under the auspice of blackened thrash metal but also features one of my favorite album covers in all of the metal universe! The cover art does pretty much prognosticate what you should expect with THE DWELLING as well. While rooted in the same blackened thrash noise metal that SABBAT had latched onto since the beginning, THE DWELLING is a masterwork composition more in the vein of an epic classical opus from a time long ago.

While the 59:48 album is just shy of an hour’s playing time, it is amazing in how it crafts that much playing time off of a few simple melodies that are teased out into different directions with lengthy bursts of blackened thrash metal passages and cemented together with more tender transitions such as the acoustic classic guitar sequence that occurs about the half way mark. Another brilliant feature is the psycho piano parts towards the end and the coolest thing of all is that the whole shebang is played by the trio of Gezol (bass, vocals), Temis Osmond (guitars, vocals, keyboards) and Zorugelion (drums). The overall effect of these subtle changes that alternate with completely different stylistic approaches is very much in the vein of how Jethro Tull crafted an album’s worth of changes with a single theme on their masterpiece “Thick As A Brick.”

THE DWELLING begins with a catchy melodic hook that is nurtured for a while in a classic heavy metal approach fortified with thrash metal heft and then allowed it to shift gears a bit and slowly morph into a different series of riffing. The tempos change around with some crafty instrumental parts, tasty guitar solos and when the vocals do chime in they supposedly revolve around a concept but i’m honestly not sure what it is and can’t seem to find any info about it and in the long run doesn’t really matter since the music is completely enthralling and in a big way. For an hour’s worth of playing time for one sprawling track it would be very easy to lose track but somehow despite all odds SABBAT succeeds in keeping the album engaging.

My only minor gripe is that some sequences do play on a bit too long as the band milks certain ideas for this is actually not very common. The usual status quo is to embellish an idea and its possibilities and then shift on to something similar but different. For example after the first twenty minutes winds down, the music suddenly bursts into a new thrash metal sequence that continues on with different guitar solos, varying drumming patterns and tempo changes. Despite THE DWELLING bringing Edge of Sanity’s lauded “Crimson” to mind, this one is not particularly progressive at least in terms of crafty complexities and time signature changes but it is very artful in how it stitches together various compositions and fuses them into one monstrous musical adventure. By far my favorite SABBAT album and one that only gets better each time i give it a spin.

Warthur With its six tracks tending towards respectable lengths, the Japanese Sabbat clearly hadn't lost their appetite for long-form songwriting since The Dwelling but didn't take it to such an extreme here, instead presenting a terser album of high-energy, thrashy, catchy as hell black metal. The production drags out the guitar front and centre, and Temis Osmond makes good use of the spotlight.

Where the line is drawn in Sabbat's discography between thrashy black metal and blackened thrash is a tricky one, but here I'd say that the uncompromisingly aggressive stance of the second wave black metal spearheaded by the Norwegian cabal (and, of course, Sabbat's fellow countrymen Sigh) it sits on the black metal side of the equation, particularly since Sabbat's well-honed love for Venom doesn't quite extend into the sort of carefree sloppiness of Venom's classic releases.

Warthur Whilst black metal had been developing by stops and starts in Europe, Sabbat had been plugging away in Japan at their own brand of thrashy black metal continuously since the mid-1980s, and their 1994 album Fetishism presents a fearsomely honed sound that has any of the then-current second wave Norwegian black metal groups licked in terms of sheer aggression.

Although they gave the name to the subgenre, Venom's early stuff tends not to be regarded as black metal these days - it's mostly rough and ready speed metal with NWOBHM influences and lo-fi sound quality. If, however, Venom had actually continued in a more truly black metal direction - or, for that matter, if Mayhem had kept to the sound of the Deathcrush demo - then by 1994 they might have evolved into something that sounds a little bit like this album.

UMUR "Envenom" is the debut full-length studio album by Japanese black/thrash metal act Sabbat. The album was released through Evil Records in March 1991. The original pressing was only for 500 CD copies (and some cassette tape copies), but the album has subsequently been reissued several times by different labels on both CD, vinyl and cassette tape.

The music on "Envenom" is old school raw thrash metal with a blackened edge. The latter style is mostly heard in the raspy raw vocals, because the rest of the music is thrash metal to the bone. There is the occasional use of more melodic higher pitched raw vocals, but the black metal rasp is the dominant vocal style on the album. It´s artists like Bathory and Hellhammer that come to mind, so it´s safe to say Sabbat aren´t out to invent the wheel on this release. What they do deliver is a very effective, raw, and well played thrash metal attack (with the occasional nod towards speed metal) with occult/satanic lyrics, which is abundantly clear from songtitles like "Satan Bless You", "Devil Worship", and "King of Hell". The tracks are simple, but catchy and memorable. It´s hard not to bang your head while screaming along to one of the anthemic choruses. Yes it´s that infectious...

The musicianship is generally strong but I´d like to mention the many well played guitar solos as one of the assets to the band´s sound. The raw organic sound production is another great asset which provide exactly the right environment for the music to shine. The 12 tracks, 50:34 minutes long album might be a couple of tracks too long for it´s own good, but other than that it is a very strong debut release by Sabbat and a 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is deserved.