SINERGY: Suicide by My Side

Released: 2002

Sinergy was one band that always seemed to know what metal was about and with a wealth of experience in groups from all over the Nordic states behind them they also knew how to do it. With Suicide by My Side, they really applied themselves and just lay to with a blistering assault of catchy, neck-snappin’ heavy metal. Leaving some of the campier and flouncier elements of their earlier efforts well and truly alone, Sinergy went for the jugular from the very first moment.

This was easily one of the best albums of pure metal of 2002, but has since become almost something of a forgotten classic as the years have rolled by without a follow-up. Suicide by My Side is edgier, heavier, faster and more aggressive than their previous output, and yet still piles on even more and better hooks and killer harmonies and melodies with the kind of incisive twin lead guitar attack some may have thought disappeared a decade before. This was where Alexei Laiho and Roope Latvala first teamed up as an axe team, and the chemistry was so good that Latvala joined Children of Bodom a few months later

Almost everything else was right with this album too, from Kimberly Goss’ amazing vocals delivering menace and melody in the one pint-sized package to the classic metal riffing and solid drum work like the Bay Area meeting the NWOBHM head-on and demolishing everything. ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ and ‘The Sin Trade’ open the piece with a flurry of blows that just keep coming and the awesome ‘Passage to the Fourth World’ is like a homage to the glory days gone by.

With all ten songs raging by in just on 38 minutes, you can flip it right back to the start and get nailed all over again in less time than it takes to listen to the second half of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, and it's far more enjoyable too. Sinergy pretty much stalled after this when Laiho and Goss called it splitsville, but even if this had been the only album they did it would have been worth it.

1. I Spit on Your Grave
2. The Sin Trade
3. Violated
4. Me, Myself, My Enemy
5. Written in Stone
6. Nowhere for No One
7. Passage to the Fourth World
8. Shadow Island
9. Suicide by My Side
10. Remembrance

Rating: 86%