Tuesday, August 31, 2010

One and Done? Pt. 1: Sanctity

Well, let's do something new. I have lots of stuff in the works right now, all of which are requiring me to listen to multiple albums, so let's do a quick one just to prove I'm still alive. Believe me, you will enjoy the long posts coming up.

Sanctity is a melodic thrash metal band from North Carolina. They only released one full-length album (hence the title of this series). They did have a couple of demos and an EP, but only the one actual album. The band was unfairly lumped in with metalcore on account of their melodic music and occasional clean vocals. However, this album is truly catchy. It's not terribly aggressive, but it is undeniably metal. They were closely associated with Trivium, which did not really help the whole metalcore accusations.

The band is notable for perfecting the sound that Trivium and God Forbid were going for without making it sound forced. However, their vocalist left after his daughter was born and one of the other members left due to a personal situation. The band replaced the two members but were never really heard from again. I would have liked to hear something else by the band, as I believe they could have been a huge mainstream metal band, without sacrficing some of their sound.

5 comments:

  1. I've never heard of them. I'm trying to think of other examples of this phenomenon off the top of my head, and it's not easy. We're lucky we can't say that about Cynic anymore. You already did Morbid Saint, and I got the impression you didn't care for Probot. Aside from those, I can't really think of anything, at least right now.

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  2. Oh, Thergothon. How could I forget that?

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  3. I have one or two other ideas for this, which I won't spoil. Morbid Saint was considered, but technically they did record another album, it just was not released while they were active. It can be found if you search hard enough.

    I didn't dislike Probot musically, it was more the idea of it. It was a vanity project.

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  4. I'm not sure what you're referring to with Morbid Saint. Lock Up Your Children and Destruction System are demos, and I wouldn't really count demos. The latter was released as bonus tracks to Spectrum of Death, but I wouldn't count bonus tracks either. If you're talking about something other than those, my curiosity is piqued.

    I can get that about Probot though. I wouldn't exactly put Dave Grohl on any kind of list of . . . anything, really. He's not ordinarily worth mentioning. Musically, though, it has some very good moments, and the guest vocalist list is kind of a who's-who of awesome (Lemmy, King Diamond, Tom Warrior, Cronos). I also got it shortly after it came out, which was before I really got into underground metal; in a sense, it was an early exposure from an unlikely source.

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  5. Destruction System is the one I was referring to. I was under the impression that this was supposed to be the follow-up full-length album. It is difficult to find, particularly in physical format.

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