Avg. Customer Review:
Number of Reviews: 6

	143 of 296 people found the following review helpful:
	ONE OF DEATH METAL'S TOP TEN ALBUMS EVER.	02/23/2003
	Reviewer: A viewer   from Tampa, Florida
	This album is insane. It is not your typical death metal music, there's a lot of dynamics going on in the album... tension and release, like great story telling. Salem really keeps you on your toes, you don't know what is going to happen next. The lyrics are not about ancient demons but about their reality, which turns out to be our collective reality since September 11th, 2001. Kristin E. Wallace is a Goddess. She sings on 4 songs. Her voice is like velvet, her harmonies are heavenly. The one sentence she repeats on Act of War is giving me goose skin every time I hear it. She is on the song for 25 seconds but she is definitely the highlight of the song. The interaction between her soft feminine voice and Zeev's harsh growl is great. I wish they had more of it on the album. There are no guitar solos on the album but the riffs are so melodic and the harmonies are intense. Both guitars hardly ever play the same part and it's something you hardly ever hear in this genre. Coming End of Reason (song number 2) is a hit. So many layer are there, the more you listen to it the more you can pick out. Slave (number 3) is the most aggressive song on the album and breaks into a Middle-eastern little tune (number 4) beautifully. The next tune crosses over and is everything Salem is. It has aggression and it has finesse. It has fast interludes and it has groovier ones... really really good. Can not recommend this one enough to you. (forgot to mention a way above the average production values that this album has which is always a plus.)
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	144 of 288 people found the following review helpful:
	reviewed by: Joel Steudler/Starvox.-3	11/24/2002
	Reviewer: Salem Friend   from USA
	Avoiding inconsistency and incompatibility while employing such a diverse array of styles is almost impossible, and yet Salem manage to do so in seemingly effortless fashion. Despite 'Collective Demise' being the first release that will reach many metal fans outside of Israel, Salem has been around for quite some time. According to the press material given to me, they have exsited in one form or another since 1985 and have been recording music since 1992. This longevity explains how the band has achieved such a mature sound and has been able to weave together so many intriguing bits from various styles of metal into their own unique patchwork quilt of raw, aggressive dark music. In this age of 'flavor of the month' clone bands copying any successful formula and pandering to particular audience demographics, 'Collective Demise' is a bold and impressive statement from a band who has found their own voice. Fans of creative, powerful, unique music that spans genres ranging from thrash to death to black metal without falling squarely into any of their pigeonholes will not regret seeking out Salem's 'Collective Demise'. This album will particularly appeal to those whose metal fandom is rooted in the harsher thrash stylings of the late 80's/early 90's... but fans from all eras will appreciate the rich tapestry of sound and raw propulsive energy Salem incorporates into their music. This album is not to be missed.
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	145 of 292 people found the following review helpful:
	reviewed by: Joel Steudler/Starvox.-2	11/24/2002
	Reviewer: Salem Friend   from USA
	'Collective Demise' seems to bring together influences from all walks of metal, but in particular feels like a spiritual descendent of Sepultura's work in the early to mid 90's. Sepultura's albums 'Arise', 'Chaos A.D.', and 'Roots' showed a progression from thrashy deathmetal to a hybrid death/thrash/industrial/ethnic sound, to finally a heavily ethnic/tribal death sound. Salem packs all those elements into 'Collective Demise', and amazingly it works very well on all levels... perhaps even better than it did for Sepultura (though Sepultura were superior at writing catchy choruses and memorable riffs). Even that comparison, though, fails to describe Salem's sound in full. As I listen to several of the songs on this album, I am also reminded of the rhythm riffs from many a King Diamond / Mercyful Fate album, carrying a tuneful but macabre tone with driving force. The clean female vocals which are interpsersed liberally throughout the twelve tracks add a tinge of nordic melodic deathmetal flavor to an already dense stew of sound. One element curiously absent from Salem's melting pot is any kind of prominent guitar soloing. Normally I would lament such an omission, but in the context of the sound Salem crafts, guitar solos would seem gratuitous and tacked on.
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	159 of 308 people found the following review helpful:
	reviewed by: Joel Steudler/Starvox.-1	11/24/2002
	Reviewer: Salem Friend   from USA
	If there is any advantage to becoming jaded and pessimistic (and trust me - there is very little to recommend about holding such attitudes), that advantage would be feeling an extra big jolt of shock and delight when something exceeds my low expectations. When I received this month's stack of promos I took one look at the booklet art for Salem's new album 'Collective Demise', noticed their stereotypically deathy looking logo and figured 'great, another generic deathmetal record. Better go get my earplugs.' My glib presumptions proved to be far off target. When I actually listened to the album I was treated to forty eight minutes of surprisingly inventive, tuneful, and yet still brutal music that is as exotic as the land from which it comes. Israel isn't the first place I think of when someone hands me a new metal release, but at least on this occasion there is no doubt that Israelis are as capable as their foreign peers at crafting the heaviest of metal. On 'Collective Demise', the band's fifth album (and first to reach wide distribution), Salem provides listeners with a diverse array of sounds that loosely fall into a deathmetal context. The variety in the band's approach to each song keeps the album quite interesting over its full length. Instead of sticking to a forumlaic and uniform assault on the ears as many deathmetal albums do, Salem integrates many different sounds into the mix while still keeping an aggressive posture. In addition to the all-too-familiar guitar/bass/drum/growly-vocal combo, listeners will encounter middle eastern ethnic percussion and melodies, sparse use of synth-distorted drumbeats and keyboards, and beautiful clean vocals supplied by Kristin E. Wallace. Salem also avoids another trap many deathmetal bands seem to fall into by varying the tempo of their songs. Many slower paced moments are mixed in with the faster numbers, which is a welcome relief to my ears and in no way lessens the impact of the album.
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	145 of 293 people found the following review helpful:
	Taken from Scrolls Of Steel	10/21/2002
	Reviewer: A viewer   from U.K
	Directly from one of the hot spots of the world, Israel, here we present the most recent album from one of the oldest Israeli bands. Their name, SALEM... Emerged in the scene during 1985 and after three demos signed with german Morbid Records, in 1990. The band released some more issues and late in 2001, signed with KMG/System Shock resulting in this «Collective Demise», one of the most aggressive albums of the band. Indeed, Zeev, Lior, Michael and Nir managed to create an album that can be remembered for many years, i.e. «Collective Demise» may sure become a classic. Along the eleven songs - 'Broken Yet United' (stating Israel's cultural/political situation), 'Coming End of Reason', 'Slave', a tradicional Israeli melody, 'Act Of War', 'Collective Demise', 'Dead Eyes', 'Feed On Your Grief', 'Decadence In Solitude', 'Recall' and 'Inhuman Greed' - you'll surely be taken back to the old days of Death Metal (remember DEATH's «Scream Bloody Gore» or «Spiritual Healing»?)... With what I've just said, don't expect that SALEM are one more DEATH clone - no way! These Israeli deliver an exquisite Death Metal due to the inclusion of several tradicional tunes, specially those rather uncommon in the Western Metal plus some melodic female vocals (by Kristin Wallace) that definitely enchance the musical structure; all mixed together results in this excellent album, that the common metalhead listener will enjoy and the avid Death Metal fan will delirate until the CD-player laser burns out... What's more to say? That they are a reference in the Eastern scene? Maybe... Yet, with this «Collective Demise» the band will be surely pointed as a reference in the Death Metal scene... Who said that Death was dead?...
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