Saurian – Devil Among Men (2024)
We were not expecting Saurian’s new single ‘Devil Among Men’ to be philosophical. Given the title, the two bars of a booming drumbeat, and the hair-band style party riff, we were all geared up to hear a hyper-sexual rebel anthem. Instead, the band delivers (and exemplifies) a hair-band style meditation on deception. If such a thing never existed before, it does now.
The four-piece Saurian from Dunedin, New Zealand, has an album dating back to 2020 and a flurry of singles and EPs over the intervening years. ‘Devil Among Men’ is their first of 2024 and in keeping with a sound heavily influenced by 80s rock in form if not in function.
Frontman Karl Brinsdon says the song “is about how so many people present themselves as being nice, but turn out to be quite the opposite. It’s a song about misplaced trust.” And so he sings of the people around him: “Gotta be careful or I’m gonna get robbed/ And I don’t want to see myself for sale in a pawnshop.”
‘Devil Among Men’ depends on a few musical devices to keep the dominant riff from being tiresome: a couple of lead guitar fills, a short stinging solo, and a chorus that double-times briefly into heavy metal land. While these things work well, even the song’s brevity (it stops just short of three minutes) doesn’t keep the riff from getting stuck in your head after only a couple of listens.
Catchiness has its appeal, but it’s the lyrics that give ‘Devil Among Men’ an edge which the band further exemplifies using an AI-generated video. Brinsdon comments: “We used artificial intelligence to generate the artwork and music video because we wanted to use it as a statement. AI is now out there on the internet wherever we look, and we have to be careful of what we trust.”
VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED
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