Sacred Reich – Heal – 1996
Heal is Sacred Reich’s 4th full-length studio album if I’m not mistaken. They maintained a pretty even pace at this point in their career. Ignorance in 1987, The American Way in 1990, Independent in 1993, and Heal in 1996. That means that the band should have had enough time to invest in every album I think. At least that’s how it plays out in my mind. But they are all very different from each other and after Heal, they more or less went into hiatus. I heard some rumors that Phil Rind more or less quit music to be a full-time dad at the time but I don’t know if that’s correct or not. Kudos to him if it really is true. To give up a successful career as a touring musician to be with your family earns great respect in my book.
If you have read the earlier reviews of the albums I’ve written you know what I think about their development musically up until the previous album Independent. And I’ve heard all these albums before when they first came out. Now I’m just refreshing my memory to be able to write these reviews. My memory had me fooled a bit though. I was under the impression that Heal was the album I liked the least but that is actually not true. Yes, it’s quite different from the previous albums in some respects, there are some distorted vocals for one thing that I don’t care too much about. I guess Sacred Reaich wanted to sound modern at the time but that was just not for me, at least not back in 1996.
Producion
Now, I don’t mind so much. I think there’s a production-wise purpose for it and it actually suits those few moments where it’s implemented. My mind also tricked me into remembering Heal as one of those albums with a totally “wrong” sound philosophy. For me, that means a really “wet” bass sound and especially lacking those extremely “dry” bass drums sounds on The American Way.
But that seems to be only half the truth. Maybe half the album is an experimental one and doesn’t suit my ears so well. The other half, the latter half of the album is awesome! Great songs, great melodies, and lots of aggression. It’s too bad that not the entire album contains these elements. But I must raise the rating I had in my memory of Heal. It’s a lot better than I remembered it and an album I need to come back to again. At least that second half of it!
