Carving their epic sound since their reunion, Sorcerer transcends the barriers and details a coherent performance. The album highlights the majestic soaring vocals of Anders Engberg through an excellent blend of rhythm guitars, backing choirs, and aggressive riffs that yield remarkable trademarks and dynamics. The album’s opener “Morning Star” demonstrates mid-paced heaviness and transforms the vibrancy of the backing vocals, which are laden with fine rhythm guitars and powerful melodic lines. Riffs on the album are like flickering fire combining some scorching epic heavy metal leads that enhance the atmosphere in the album’s title track “Reign of the Reaper”.

The guitarist duo Kristian Niemann and Peter Hallgren lay a powerful bone to this majestic song. The heavy guitars rumble along with an ominous dark tone adding some crushing metallic doom sections to fuel the tempo, given a tremendous amount of catchy lead guitars that are followed by sublime exalting vocals. Meticulously blending energetic grooving sections, the fourth album has everything the band stood for since its reunion in 2010. Even though “Reign of the Reaper” upholds the classic doomy elements in several tracks like “Thy Kingdom Will Come”, the guitars find the right approach, providing plenty of heavy galloping riffs. And this shows what the previous album lacked in general. The band’s versatile performance offers some of the most enthralling array of styles that is very organic and heavy, resulting in creating a chugging flow to the album.

The soaring vocals are swathed in pure elegance and every so often there is an uplifting flawless chorus that holds a supreme flare, the use of the acoustic guitars perfectly integrates into the opening intro of the track “Eternal Sleep”. Though I somehow felt incredibly nostalgic to reminisce about Tony Martin’s Black Sabbath era of the late 80s and early 90s, Sorcerer’s newest album highlights the band’s latest achievement and shows how the Swedes have evolved in the last few years. The mid-paced sections have a powerful heaviness topped by catchy lead guitars and keep the epic doom nature of the songs that are brimming into a majestic rhythm and beautifully showcased in “Curse of Medusa”.

The main riff of this song has an ominous tune of Middle-Eastern riffs that reverberates through the precise metallic drumming of Richard Evensand. The atmosphere gets caught in a heavy cloak of intense grooving at the same time keeping the doomy atmosphere and boasting dark keyboard effects in the background. “Unveiling Blasphemy” defines the craft of songwriting where the band once again proves its talent for blending multiple textures like the lead guitars, heaviness, melody contrasts, and catchy soaring vocals and pushing the band’s trademarks to the new towering edifice.

The booming tone of the bass guitar of Justin Biggs and the thundering drums take a crushing beating tempo. There is a mastery that gives the album an operatic scale, while everything from the perfect instrumentation and the vocals has a dynamic and powerful ebb and flow.

Sorcerer manages to sound aggressive and heavy on tracks like “The Underworld”. The pacing of the song intensifies as the focus becomes on heavy percussion. The chugging guitars are mostly intermixed with bombastic guitar solos and galloping drums entering the arena mixing ultra-heaviness these moments add thrilling double bass and shredding solos aplenty.

The final track “Break of Dawn” begins at a slower pace led by monumental soaring anthems, but it also proves how Sorcerer has cemented its sound at reaching the epic doom peak. The slow crawling riffs immediately paint an ominous vista when the acoustic guitars meander into an elegant pulse and emphasize the sensible atmosphere by creating powerful up-tempos that fit colossal crushing riffs in such a compelling contrast. For all the songwriting perceptiveness and the incredible performance of the Swedes on their fourth album, “Reign of the Reaper” yields a qualitative improvement from the predecessor. Sorcerer offers its fans yet another superb piece of heavy/doom metal and holds the flame high as one of the pioneer leaders in today’s modern epic metal.

Links