Sabazius - The Descent Of Man (2013) - A massive waste of time - 1% (25/05/14)

Sabazius is a British drone and doom metal band hailing from Brighton and London that released a quite special song these days. The band has always been known for a few longer tracks somewhere between fifteen and seventy-five minutes of running time but this time, the duo went even further.

Sabazius' new track is entitled “The Descent Of Man” and has a stunning running time of eleven hours, sixteen minutes and fifty-four seconds. The two members recorded for fourteen hours straight. They even had the intention to go for a full twenty-four hours but they felt they had done what they had to a few hours before. As this song is way too long for a usual disc, the whole thing is released on a USB stick with a size of exactly 6,66 GB. The two musicians probably only edited this track by a few hours to obtain this evil and stereotypical number.

All of this sounds very funny and original and the band surely didn’t take their work all too serious and had loads of fun in the studio. Nevertheless, the final result is nothing but depressive and noisy anti-music without any major changes through the whole track. The music gets quickly annoying, boring and may cause severe headaches after a few minutes only. Imagine how hard it is to make it through the entire song. The pace is very slow and one only hears distorted guitar sounds and minimal bass tones. After something like six hours, a drum kit comes into play from time to time that sounds very tinny and turns out to be as hard to digest as the other instruments. The massive use of cymbals and hi-hats makes the whole thing even more annoying. Six hours later, the song finally develops something one could call a few coherent rhythms but they quickly get repetitive as well and fail to add some pace or surprises to this epic piece of weirdness.

The band gives the advice to get ready for a journey deep into our psyches while listening to this song. If it is some kind of journey, it’s nothing more than a journey to boring negativism that might inspire dumb feelings in your head or suicidal ideas. This track is obviously just a joke and a complete waste of time. That’s probably why this experiment will soon get a cult status and will be checked out by many metal fans all around the world but this doesn’t make the song any better. If the same thing had been done by some gifted musicians, it would have been interesting enough to get a few more points but that's not the case. This is the most annoying thing I have ever heard and I guess that’s exactly what the band intended and what many other people will feel like. This is completely senseless in any term of the expression.

Just avoid this at all costs.

Originally written for The Metal Observer