A little uninteresting
It's often a worry when the press release starts with 'Behold, Into Abaddon'. It's even more disconcerting when the band was formed after the drummer and guitarist had a 'vision quest'. The result is Saviours, Oakland's take on 70s doom mixed with the new wave of British heavy metal. Apparently Saviours is an ipecac (eh? The press people are just making it up now) reaction to the sorry state of heavy music. I'm not sure who Saviours have been listening to, but my guess it's American corporate rock and MTV 2, which is pretty woeful as we all know. But heavy music is split in many different and specialist genres, and I think Saviours would do well to explore all areas of rock and metal, because if 'Into Abaddon' is their reaction to the sorry state of heavy music then they could be creating exactly what they hoped to react against, in my opinion at least.
'Into Abaddon' is a bad un. It's not dreadful, but it lacks any sort of hooks and melodies that stick in the memory. Sometimes the band get it exactly right, the end instrumental section of 'Narcotic Sea' is surprisingly good, utilising its slow beat and echoed lead guitar. The main riff of 'Cavern Of Mind' is foot tappingly catchy and the start of 'Inner Mountain Arthame' is nice and doomy. Sadly, there aren't enough of these moments to keep the seven songs afloat. The rest of the ideas seem laboured and tired almost sounding like a band on their eleventh album and going through the motions.
Think of Motorhead with all the charisma taken out and you'll get an idea of where Saviours are at with this release. The weakest aspect of 'Into Abaddon' is Austin Barber's vocals. Coming across as a poor man's lemmy, he has one note in his range and it sounds like he's straining to hit that. All his vocal melodies revolve around this one note, which becomes very tiresome very quickly. All the hard work the band has done with harmonies and rhythm are lost with Barber's monotonous straining.
I can see what Saviours are trying to do, but I don't think they have the core ideas to pull it off just yet. There are seeds of encouragement for the future in the music and what material they have will no doubt be great on the live stage. On disc, however, it all sounds little tame and one-dimensional. You should check out Mastodon, The Sword, Queens Of The Stone Age and even Motorhead themselves before forking out your cash for this.