Sinamore
Seven Sins A Second
6.3
As much as I enjoyed Sinamore's debut, A New Day, there were only a few songs that really stuck and writing that review was a chore. Gothic metal can be sweeping, emotional and honest, but A New Day was none of those things. It proved itself to be a boring album after the fact. Had I know the replay value was going to be so low, I probably would have adjusted the scores. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. This brings us to Sinamore's second stab at melancholy, Seven Sins A Second.
Very little has changed. Same line-up. Same middle-of-the-road goth metal. It's too bad really. Mikko Heikkila sings with conviction, and guitarist Tommi Muhli puts together a few decent riffs. The elements are there. The chemistry is not. There's no "Crimson Leaf" or "Follow Into the Cry" to save us from the monotony this time either. A song like "The Burning Frame" speeds things up for a while, but there just aren't enough hooks to keep Seven Sins A Second afloat. And don't convince yourself otherwise; good gothic metal is often determined by hooks. Keep in mind that there is a difference between shooting for hooks and loading your album with choruses. As great a voice as Heikkila possesses, he doesn't use it often enough to create his own hooks, so it has to come from someone else. Muhli would be that someone else were it not for the fact that he seems to have a love affair with repetition. I kept asking myself, "Didn't I hear this same pattern on the last song?" Sinamore sounds all too much like cheap Sentenced worship minus the killer riffs. And what is Sentenced without its riffs?
The music industry has gotten to the point where it almost seems like there's a new release every seven seconds. There was shit clogging the arteries of the industry before Sinamore, and, no doubt, there will be even more shit after Sinamore. The purpose behind any band is to produce music worth listening to. Unfortunately, Seven Sins A Second is just another boring record to toss onto the mountainous pile of "meh"-worthy crap.
Related
SinamoreA New Day
2/21/2006