Album Review: Under A Dying Sun

In this digital age, it’s not often that you get a full length record anymore. Everything is short and sweet just to get content out there before fans forget your band even exists. So, I got a pleasant surprise when I was asked to review an album to discover it was Sonic Altar’s 2014 album Under A Dying Sun. A full twelve tracks of sonic goodness that runs just short of an hour (with an average track length of nearly five minutes!).

Straight of the bat, there is such an obvious international edge to the sound; you can tell it was mixed and mastered in Finland, where that scene of symphonic heavy metal thrives. Sonic Altar themselves are incredibly tight in their musicianship, with some brilliantly consistent high pace on the guitars sprayed with a generous helping of crash symbols.

What really stands out with this Kiwi band is the clean vocal style of singer Kane Bennett. Unlike most heavy metal to come from our shores, which supplements the deep drudging guitars with heavy growls and screams, Bennett instead goes for the high clean route, with the odd abrasive element thrown in. In many cases, this style of vocals can make the music feel hollow, but there is such depth to the instrumentation that this is not the case here.

The vocal timbre provides an almost 80’s aesthetic with the level of resonance and reverb. Much like the style that was notably popular back in the days of Black Sabbath and Dio. Creating an almost speed/symphonic metal hybrid, Sonic Altar provide thick dark riffs at a very organic rhythm that gets the head banging with some well-balanced synth that permeates into every nook and cranny.  

Admittedly their sound is so consistent that as the album progresses it could easily start to feel like much of the same, but they switch up the pace with the likes of Black Days and The Killer in Me, to keep everything engaging.

Their sound is so entrenched in that European heavy metal scene that their track Ghost in the Mirror is reminiscent of Swedish band, Ghost, during the choruses with some nods to the styling of Swedish prog-rockers Opeth in the heavier breakdowns. 

High-quality production, piercing vocals, and solid musicianship makes Under A Dying Sun a top-notch sing-along, headbanging album