Sentenced

The Funeral Album (Century Media)
by Martin Popoff

Perhaps it’s due to the potent combination of relentless press drubbings and their own fatalistic titles, lyrics, music, and vocals, but Sentenced have found reason to call The Funeral Album their last. The band’s hoary, bed-headed dirty rock sound is very thankfully intact on this “just another amusing Sentenced album” Sentenced album. There’s a really strange, almost stoopid anti-Christian screed on this thing, but other than that, look for scads and scabs of the band’s almost giddily suicidal melodic trundle rock, Sentenced in possession of a sound all their own, a sound that I totally dig. And, in case you were worried, Ville is still weirdly and seductively out of tune, reminding me somewhat of Ian Gillan’s or Anders Friden’s approaches to melody. Riffs punk and plunk their way along craggy, unyielding ground somewhere in Finland, production rushed and electric and bold, lotsa songs in lotsa styles, critics be damned, for we pine.
(www.centurymedia.com)