Entropia - Unhealable Scars (2023)

Country: Saudi Arabia
Style: Melodic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Jan 2023
Sites: Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

I believe Unhealable Scars is only an EP, but it runs forty seconds longer than Reign in Blood, even with only five songs on offer, so I'm thinking of it like a short album. It's from a Saudi Arabian band called Entropia, who only formed last year but who have already got this far, with another single from last year that inexplicably didn't make the cut. The second single, Born Unknown, did, so why did they leave off Son of Dracula? Answers on the back of a postcard, as always.

They play a melodic form of doom/death metal that's very accessible but also very varied. It kicks off with Hopeless almost a grunge song with a doom filter applied to it, right down to the vocals, but then a harsh voice takes over, deep and resonant, and things settle down into more traditional territory for a while. It stays a highly unusual song, though, with the styles shifting and some perky drums from Hassan popping in at points, almost like I'd expect from commercial era Genesis.

I got used to this fresh take on doom/death reasonably quickly and started to really dig the ideas on show. Chaos in Silence starts out almost new wave, with dominant keyboards, but it eventually settles down. It continues to alternate between clean and harsh voices, but the clean one sounds less grunge and more folk on this one, even if both are supplied by the same man. Certainly, I see Abdullah AlGhamdi listed on vocals and nobody else. The riffs are heavier and the beat is quicker, reminding of points of Bucovina. I dug the guitars of Khaled C here even more.

And I dug them still more on Born Unknown, because they're elegaic as the song opens, the doom sourced from grief. They're very simple but very effective. And then we're back at full speed, fast doom with that harsh voice layered over everything. Born Unknown and No Eternity work well as a pair dealing with that cycle of grief, the sad acceptance of the solo piano that closes out the latter working well as a bookend to the guitar intro to the former. The journey between those two points is a tumultuous one, especially with No Eternity surely the doomiest piece here.

And that leaves the title track, which adds some prog into the guitar, which is yet another flavour to the mix. So this is grounded in doom, but the frequent harsh voice and pace make doom/death an appropriate definition. However, it's often faster and sometimes perkier than we expect doom to be, and it moves into alternative, folk and prog at points, not to forget regular heavy metal. It never seems to be downtuned, so guitar sections can sometimes remind us of Iron Maiden just as much as Paradise Lost. It's a tasty mix and an unusual one, which always perks up my ears.

This is only the second album I've reviewed from Saudi Arabia, after Creative Waste, but the two would seem to be wildly different in almost every way. Entropia are new, but Creative Waste have been around for a couple of decades. Entropia are based in the capital, Riyadh, at the heart of the country, while Creative Waste are a long way on the gulf coast. Entropia play an unusual mix of an array of genres, while Creative Waste are relatively straight forward old school grindcore. Clearly they're not too examples of a single scene but I'm eager to discover what else is going on in Saudi Arabia, just as I'm eager to hear more from Entropia.

This works well as a teaser, but I want to hear a full album. Maybe this does work as an EP far more than it does an album. Whatever it is, I salute its creativity, especially from such a young band.

Creative Waste - Condemned (2020)

Country: Saudi Arabia
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

If I could be surprised by anything more than the discovery that there's a grindcore band in Saudi Arabia, it's the discovery that they've been doing what they do there for a long time. While the founder members talked about the band at the tail end of the last millennium, they officially formed in 2002 and are based in the gulf coast cities Al Qatif, Dammam and Al Khobar. Whoever's in the latter is actually closer to Smouldering in Forgotten over the bridge in Bahrain as he is to whoever's in Al Qatif. Metal Archives has a note that Creative Waste performed the first metal gig in public in Saudi Arabia, so extra kudos to them. Shake the pillars of the world.

I'm not sure how much material they've issued in the past. Their website, or what passes for one, mentions four albums but Metal Archives only lists two, the first dating back to 2012 and the second being this one. Bandcamp has a short third from 2008 that Metal Archives lists as a demo. I do like the bio the band included on that page: "Creative Waste is a Saudi Arabian grindcore band. That should give you an idea of how horrible we sound." Nice.

Here, they sound pretty damn good. Their sound clearly comes from the early days of grindcore. Condemned is rather like early Napalm Death but not quite as extreme in speed, with riffs that are straight out of the first Discharge album. Other songs aren't quite as reminiscent, but both those bands come up a lot here. The abundant use of samples clearly comes from punk too, given that they're all social in nature, railing against a lot of common bugbears like wealth inequality and racism. I recognised Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky and that idiot at a Virginia public meeting who accused every Muslim of being a terrorist.

The primary reason that Creative Waste are a lot more like the Napalms than Discharge is the use of particularly wild vocals. They are varied, perhaps because vocal duties are divvied up between the two Al-Shawafs in the band (presumably brothers?), Fawaz and Talal, who were founding members and have kept Creative Waste alive ever since. Fawaz is also the band's guitarist and Talal contributes the drums but I believe it's their voices we're hearing.

I have no idea which is which but one of the voices is old school grindcore, straight out of the Lee Dorrian playbook, hurling deep guttural roars into the microphone, while the other is higher, wilder and punkier and is really a challenge to the the mixer's ability to keep him from blowing out the top end of the spectrum.

What surprised me most is how substantial these songs sounded. Back in those early days in the late eighties, I remember songs not only being very short but feeling very short. They were brief bursts of intense energy without too much of a secondary goal in structure. I remember being surprised when From Enslavement to Obliteration came out and rocked that assumption. These songs are short but not for grindcore, running in the territory of a minute and a half to double that. The New Apartheid, the only song here to make it past three minutes, feels like a more extreme sort of crossover that's far beyond anything Agnostic Front or the Crumbsuckers ever put out.

To me Creative Waste sound like a what if scenario. Imagine if the American authorities had managed to put Jello Biafra behind bars and kicked the rest of the Dead Kennedys out of the US. Imagine if they'd settled in England and got caught up in the early days of grindcore, consequently speeding up and getting more raucous. Imagine if they'd hired a new singer who came out of crust punk and wanted to emulate Lee Dorrian. And imagine if they hung out with a DJ who knew exactly how best to use samples. What you're imagining is something very close to Creative Waste.