Sabaium
Gravity Divine
5.2
Slovenia's Sabaium have a done a fairly okay job making an album that most of metal will find largely inoffensive. A bit of a backhanded compliment, sure, but there's not a whole lot you can say about a band that sounds like a simplified Bleeding Through minus the fruity clean-sung heartache. Gravity Divine combines keyboards with the kind of riffs that you phonetically recreate with your friends like amateur Jud Juds (“No, dude, it's more like ‘da-dun-dun da-da-dun!’”). To the trve snob, those that see metal as a last bastion of forward-thinking music, listening to Sabaium's uncomplicated compositions is like dressing smartly for a cocktail party, only to be surrounded by lifted-truck drivers lazily carrying rings of PBR when you get there. For the rest of us, those that have no problems disconnecting our brainstems, Gravity Divine is a somewhat listenable, albeit painfully average experience.
Sabaium may hail from Central Europe, but you get the feeling that they wish they were kicking off their shoes and feeling the sand between their toes on the California coast. The synths (along with a quick glance at their top friends on MySpace) make for an easy Bleeding Through comparison and the rest of the chug-a-luggin' during the verses and bridges reflects an interest in other O.C. bands like Throwdown. The choruses, such as the one on “Moonlight Child,” elevate the synths to the forefront to add more melody and balance out the “aggressiveness” of the preceding measures. Throw in a few well-meaning, but uninteresting solos, plus a touch of the extreme side of things (slightly blackened bellows meet the occasional Eurocore-diluted death/thrash riff), and you have Gravity Divine's basic blueprint. So, the only real variant from song to song, the only curve ball, is the synth-effect employed. Because they're ballerz on a budget, because they don't have the largest of soundbanks, we're treated to some truly oddball effects. For example, there's the child yelping on “Quest Within,” something that sounds like the result of a pedophile running through a preschool and is sure to trigger an Amber Alert if you blast it from your car stereo. A highlight it is not, but it breaks up the repetitious monotony that the band has a habit of falling into.
And, while you start to lose interest after track three, you almost want to give Sabaium a high-five for not tying to force awkward experiments or more current core clichés (i.e. teary-eyed singing) into their simple songs. They're not trying to fuse the disparate worlds of, say, Wumpscat and It Dies Today, which certainly could’ve been an embarrassing possibility, and they’re, thankfully, faux-hawk and scene-schlock free. True, the keyboards can be cheesier than a competitive fondue battle emceed by Jim Nantz, but that doesn’t stop Gravity Divine from being suitable background music for any B.Y.O.C.S. (Bring Your Own Camo Shorts) bash. In the end, Sabaium doesn't do a whole lot of things wrong, but they don’t exactly excel at much either, and that begs the question: Do you really want to pay for something so average? If you're looking to get your jun-jun on, there are far better albums, but if Gravity Divine magically appears on your doorstep, it's not as bad as you might expect.
