The hype sticker for Saints Dispelled states simply, “When it says Master, you get Master.” A truer distillation of a new Master album in 2024 would be hard to come by, I will concede — the Hammerheart press team knows what they’re doing. My work here is done.
But of course, you or I or Master all three couldn’t get off that lucky, and in all honesty, though there’s much truth to that statement — and certainly not to immediately recant on my stated confidence in the Hammerheart press team — the “Master does what Master does” summary judgment sells Saints Dispelled a little bit short.
And now to jump forward to the end, the long and short of this writing is this: Saints Dispelled is the strongest Master album in fifteen years, maybe longer, since at least Slaves To Society. Coming off out of the darkness of the late 90s and early 2000s, Slaves saw Speckmann, guitarist Alex Nejezchleba, and then drummer Zdeněk Pradlovský ripping through some of their nastiest material since the beginning, and they haven’t stopped since. The last Master, 2017’s Vindictive Miscreant, felt a little overlong, most of its songs stretching past the six-minute mark, a structural deviation from Master’s usual directness, if not entirely a stylistic one. Correcting that, Saints Dispelled also sees new drummer Peter Bajci replacing Pradlovský, and in the process, the whole trio picks up a fresh spark to add to their already burning fire.
Opening with four straight Master killers, Saints hits the ground raging; from the pounding intro of “Destruction In June” through to the stuttering hooks of “Minds Under Pressure.” These four tracks are almost archetypal Speck-metal: classic death metal-styled riffs, built upon a sturdy thrash metal chassis, each straightforward without being in any way simplistic. The focus here, as on all Master albums, is on ferocity more than any other factor, a blast of anger born of Venom and Discharge and Slayer and Motörhead, and filtered through forty years of increasing extremity, modernized and yet harking directly back to the golden days of death metal’s nascency. Nejezchleba’s guitar tones are equally filthy and stout, coated in a crusty fuzz, his solos fiery and both catchy and chaotic in that perfect Hanneman-King way. Speckmann’s bass is a gnarled and distorted underpinning, his signature vomitous vocals the same feral snarl he’s utilized for decades, no worse for wear now than it was then. Beneath it all, Bajci pounds away, bringing that extra spark, propelling Saints with a nearly palpable energy.
In the album’s back half, “The Wiseman” opens with a clean-toned bass motif, a cycling melody augmented by chiming harmonics and soon joined by twisting distorted guitars before a split-second pause drops into yet another thrashing ripper, buoyed by some of the album’s strongest riffing. “The Wizard Of Evil” closes the album proper, another full-on rocker that closes with a strong semi-technical off-time riff, but those of us lucky/informed enough to get the CD versions, get two additional tracks in “Nomads” and “Alienation Of Insanity,” the latter of which opens doomy and resolves into a bulldozer midtempo, one of Saints’ best tracks relegated to the bonus file. Such is life…
Ten songs total, in fifty minutes, and all of those, to circle back to the start, exactly what Master does and has always done, for forty years now, and yet, in all of those years, they’ve only occasionally done it this well. In a catalog filled with consistent quality, Saints Dispelled is a bit of a step further, a level above, a sharper edge and a stronger skull-punch, even if both of those are expected traits. When it says Master, you get Master, it’s true, but sometimes you get a Master-ier Master, and Saints Dispelled is one of the Master-iest Masters in a good while, and that’s a good thing.
Old dogs, old tricks, new twists, new spark, same bark, same bite, but better…
Hi Andrew, how can I reach you directly?
Would like to let you know more about my Riot documentary film project…
I don’t know why, but somehow I’ve missed out on Master for the past 40 years, despite being into metal since the 80s. I knew of them vaguely but never payed much attention to them. But all that’s in the past, cause this album is one potent, thrashing, death metal beast. I dig this band.
Thanks for the kind words my friend!speckmetal.net has more information if you’re interested!