Translated from Czech, Sedmero Hříchů means seven sins, which pretty much sums up the album: Seven tracks, each addressing one of the deadly sins with a mostly murderous bent.

So it only makes sense that the music around the growled lyrics is as dark as it is intimidating. However, as is so often the case with black metal, Sedmero Hříchů falls on the wrong side of generic – built almost exclusively on mind-numbing blast beats embellished with over-distorted riffs and the odd haunting melody line.

The first few bars of the opening track “Pýcha” (pride in English) are a disorienting mess of drums that do little more than cause a tension headache and guitars that almost fade into white noise, an approach that foreshadows the rest of the album.

There is one track that stands out, but for all the wrong reasons. “Závist” (Envy for all you anglophones) is a mess of a song with a beat that feels like a car engine torturously sputtering to death and the instruments around it seem messy in their attempts to find some kind of foot-hold in the beat.

It’s not often I can’t find anything good to say about an album, but unfortunately, Sedmero Hříchů is one of those instances. At its most tolerable, it’s an unrelenting assault of just-about average and at its least tolerable it’s an assault on the senses comparable to a hundred car alarms going off at the same time in the same street.

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