Saruman take their name from the treacherous betrayer in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy who is deceived by the dark lord Sauron into helping him destroy Middle Earth.
That is the only affiliation the band has with Tolkien and his books. The songs are not modeled after that mythology as far as I can tell in the lyrics. This be your typical necro black metal band in the lyrics dept.
Ok what can I tell you about these guys? Well the sound of the album is modern necro in production. Meaning it's better than say a
Darkthrone album but yet not as good as Enslaved's last album. So you can hear everything really well and it retains power but is also throwback enough to please necro lovers.
Take old At The Gates and some My Dying Bride with some chunky riffing and you can get a little idea of the way they write.
The blend of Death and Black vocals is common these days and I like it.
Saruman have both vocal styles nailed down. The song
"Endless Winter" has a breakdown where a clean vocal is used too. It is done well and is consistent with the songs and the overall flavor of the band. There is a little tech death taste in the tunes as well but not much or at least not enough to throw that classification on them.
One of the unique things about them is that they have a resident Viola player on the album which follows the guitar rhythms and also does melody parts on top too. From what I understand though they will not have that element anymore because the Viola player left the band and they aren't going to replace her.
Great songwriters mean that you don't get bored easily and the tunes are all different enough to keep it from being monotonous.
Sometimes the viola gets to be a little much but mostly it is very complimentary and adds a real cool power to the riffing.
The album times in at a cool 33 minutes but yet feels longer than that. Meaning i don't feel ripped off that it's that short. I like an album to do it's thing and not take forever personally. I think it allows you to get to know a few songs really well rather than 15 songs only a little bit.
Let me sum it up like this.
Saruman are a really good BM band and should only get cooler with time. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to any BM fan be they necro or modern BM fans.
Saruman run a really cool middle ground in that respect. Less progressive than say Enslaved, but more thrash like than DarkThrone by writing heavier and more complicated riffs.
I don't know a whole lot about the members and they don't have a band web site that I could find. They are on Black Attakk records in
Europe and they have a web site at www.black-attakk.de
Nearest I can figure they are a mail order music company that also has a label in it. The site is in German so be forewarned. Still it isn't hard to order something from them...they have a really cool site and it's a very modern company to buy from.
Hopefully
Saruman will keep on doing what they do and get the recognition they deserve as a great BM band. Enjoy!
Written by
David Wednesday, April 28, 2004
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