UMUR
"Aggressive Measures" is the 4th full-length studio album by Dutch death metal act Sinister. The album was released through Nuclear Blast Records in October 1998. It´s the successor to "Hate" from 1995 and features a couple of lineup changes since the predecessor. Eric de Windt has replaced Mike van Mastrigt as the band´s lead vocalist, and bassist Alex Paul has also been added to the lineup. The latter addition to the lineup means that Bart van Wallenberg only handles guitars on this album (he also handled the bass on "Hate (1995)"). Drummer (and at this point only original member) Aad Kloosterwaard completes the four-piece lineup.
Stylistically the first three albums by Sinister are old school death metal of the more fast and brutal kind (influenced by the brutal part of the early 90s US death metal scene), and the core of the band´s sound is intact on "Aggressive Measures". They´ve expanded a bit on their core sound here though, as they have added a lot of brutal grooves to their sound, and artists like Decapitated and Psycroptic come to mind. The riffs and rhythms on "Aggressive Measures" are ultra tight and the brutal grooves are infectiously catchy. The deep growling vocals are a bit one-dimensional in nature, but they suit the instrumental part of the music well.
The whole thing is delivered with great energy and considerable technical skills, so the musicianship is definitely one of the assets of the album as well as the passionate delivery and the impact of the performances. "Aggressive Measures" features a powerful, raw, and mean sounding production, which suits the material perfectly. It´s a sound designed to ripp your head off (the guitar tone is vicious). The material on the 9 track (the first track is a short intro), 31:03 minutes long album is pretty one-dimensional in nature and it´ll probably take more than one spin to tell the tracks apart, but repeated listens reveal several killer riffs and infectiously groovy brutal rhythms on the album, and the music is actually quite a bit more memorable than what initial listens might suggest.
To my ears the addition of groove to Sinister´s brutal death metal sound is a stroke of genious, and it was not the order of the day in 1998. In that respect Sinister were pioneers of that sound, and the above mentioned reference artists were pretty surely greatly influenced by the sound of this particular album. A 4 star (80%) rating is fully deserved.