Review by Rexorcist for Sabbat (GBR) - Dreamweaver (1989)

Afte having seen some pretty positive reviews for English ban Sabbat's debut album, I was quite disappointed with how monotone and one-track-minded it got overtime.  I was wondering if the fans were largely just attributed to genre fans as opposed to more explorative music buffs.  Now I may be a thrash fan, but I demand ART.  There's a noteworthy amount of that in this album, at least in comparison to the debut.  The Clerical Conspiracy, the track following the intro, boasts an almost blackened level of heaviness and production in the riffs.  Next even comes a soft folk track which lasts two minutes.  This is what I'm talking about when I want an album to be less monotone.  There's a little more creativity in the lyrics as well, on top of some prog metal aspects, which help justify this album's two eight-minute tracks, making them feel shorter than they really were, which in itself is a major strength since the band couldn't even justify the one eight-minute epic on their debut.  However, while the album is certainly wilder, most of it still sounds the same, though much more impressively so.  In fact, I couldn't even consider the last song before the one-minute outro, Mythistory, a proper send-off, because it sounded too much like other tracks, proggy aspects and all.  So this is obviously a good effort with some great moments, but while it's more creative, it carries a couple of the same basic flaws as the first.

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