UMUR
"The Great Northern Revisited" is a compilation album by Swedish grindcore act Sayyadina. The compilation was released in May 2010 by Relapse Records. I don´t know much about Sayyadina, but as far as I´ve been able to find out, the tracks on "The Great Northern Revisited" come from various splits, EPs and from the debut album "Fear Gave Us Wings (2003)".
The music style is hardcore punked grindcore. Blasting drums, simple punk riffs played in a fast and furious pace and a fiercely aggressive vocal delivery to boot. The fact that the tracks come from various releases is obvious as the sound quality varies. The production is pretty good on most tracks though. Raw and sounding like it was recorded in one take most of the time but very enjoyable. One thing that´s not so enjoyable is that the volume changes between tracks from the various releases. Maybe it´s only the promo I´m reviewing that has this error. I hope that´s the case because it´s rather annoying.
The compilation contains 30 tracks and even though I enjoy the full album, it does become a bit exhausting towards the end. Maybe a bit more compositional variation would have done the trick. There are different ideas here and there that makes some of the songs stand out, but not enough to really make the songs stick in my mind.
"The Great Northern Revisited" is probably a good introduction to the sound of Sayyadina and if you enjoy your grindcore with a hardcore punked attitute and delivery, you could do much worse than purchasing this compilation. A 3 star rating is warranted.