Sarah Jezebel Deva – A Sign of Sublime (2010)

Having performed for Therion, Cradle Of Filth, The Kovennat, among many others, Sarah Jezebel Deva is one of the most recognized and female voices of Metal. Her appearances for said bands have been mostly showcasing her classical voice and not her ‘natural’ voice. In her lackluster own band Antagoria she started using a ‘cleaner’ more normal sounding voice and on her solo album she almost goes as far as ‘going pop’, like Liv Kristine and other female vocalists have done.

We love Gothic Metal and almost any other type of metal that features female vocals, and when we got this promo we immediately got excited. This feeling lasted for about 2 songs and then it just changed into disappointment. Some of the songs in this album are good but others just lack inspiration and aim. She has stated that she wanted to give something for everybody and she has somewhat achieved that, but for the core of her fans we think they will be disappointed.

Featuring musicians such as Martin Powell (ex- My Dying Bride, ex-Cradle of Filth) and Dave Pybuss (Cradle of Filth among others) we imaged the music would be at least somewhat interesting and again, we only find 3-4 songs decent and nothing else to show for. For examples, songs like “Dabby’s Not Coming Home” sound like a half-assed pop song with a singer that was bored to death when recording a song. The arrangements are decent, but the vocals do not fit the song at all.

The lowest blow of this album is when Sarah decided to cover “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks. This is probably one of the worst ‘Metal’ covers we have ever heard and pretty much just laughed through the song. As you can notice we are being a bit too harsh, but then again, we expected something completely different and in an objective way: GOOD.

This release does feature some decent songs like: “The Road To Nowhere”, nice melancholic song, “Your Wonderful Chair”, brilliant riffing and overall structure of the song, a Cradle of Filth type song, “They Called Her Lady Tyranny”, a song we thought it was called lady tranny, and “She Stands Like Stone”, powerful and melodic. But the rest is just to disconnected and garbled up together in our opinion.

If you are a true hardcore fan of Sarah we recommend you get the album and decide for yourself, but for us it’s just not good enough and even worse than Antagoria. If you are looking into discovering some Gothic Metal bands or good female singers, we recommend you to skip this album and get something more substantial. As fans we are disappointed, as critics we are also wondering how 3 very good musicians can come up with such a mess of an album.

Release: August 24th, 2010

Country: UK