Gloryful
Cult of Sedna

The fourth album by Gloryful, can it be glorious? It is called Cult of Sedna, interesting name as Sedna has to be one of the more interesting objects in our solar system, also named after a sea goddess from Inuit legends. One can only guess what the cult is about; I hope it is not the cool space rock as this album isn’t worthy of that. It follows in the same vein as the previous Gloryful albums we have reviewed, none of them has been overly impressive and this is more of the same I think.

 They call themselves, or the label labels them, “true metal” which is commonly a substitute for ridiculously boring stuff like a degraded copy of a degraded copy – something like that. Heavy metal is how it is probably best described, fairly speedy and energetic, somewhat catchy as well and with a decent production. Nothing earth-shatteringly ground-breaking in terms of the creative side, far less interesting than reading about or looking at pictures or artists renderings of 90377 Sedna. Not much variation and depth can be found in the music either so I would claim that the album is one the long side and that the vocalist is rather poor.

Fans of the so-called true metal might find this appealing; I thought that it started quite well. The first few songs are rather good, especially Brothers in Arms which is a song that I like. But the further the album continues, the less interesting it becomes and when we get to the end it feels like Gloryful remains at the same uninteresting spot that they have occupied for the entirety of their musical career. They haven’t really evolved at all since the debut, and the debut was rather boring so that says more or less everything you need to know about this album – it does get more exciting than this, most of the time.

I have to say though, that the great guitar playing from Adrian Weiss adds at least some quality to the album, but Adrian does a lot better when he makes instrumental solo albums than when he is part of Gloryful. It would have been great had they dared to make something that wasn’t a tied old cliché that has been done many times before. If I were able I would have thrown this album and the rest of the Gloryful discography to Sedna where it could lie on the red surface and freeze for eons, and be no closer to the sun than at about 75 AU and most of the time a lot further away than that. But as I can’t I guess I can recommend that those feeling like they want to hear this stuff just listen to the first few songs then turn it off. The ending conclusion will have to be that repeating the same dull concept over and over doesn’t make it more fun.

HHHHHHH