Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: gothic metal

Showing posts with label gothic metal. Show all posts

Monday, 24 February 2025

Dawn of Solace - Affliction Vortex

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter

Tuomas Saukkonen seems to be alternating his bands lately. The previous Dawn of Solace album, Flames of Perdition, came out in 2022, then Before the Dawn released Stormbringers in 2023 and Wolfheart issued Draconian Darkness in 2024. Now he's back to Before the Dawn for their fourth album and the third I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later. For anyone new to all of these, he's a Finnish multi-instrumentalist, Wolfheart play melodic death metal, Dawn of Solace play gothic metal and Before the Dawn are in between, playing both.

This album follows closely from its predecessor, many songs starting out in gothic rock territory but building into a metal crunch. The metal is usually relatively slow and doomy, with occasional shifts in tempo like the glorious urgency midway through Invitation. The vocals are mostly clean, courtesy of Mikko Heikkilä, best known for Kaunis Kuolematon, but Saukkonen occasionally adds a harsh voice, starting on Fortress. I like both voices—Heikkilä's an elegant tenor, Saukkonen's a rich growl—but they're also highly compatible. Into the Light and Perennial put them into close proximity, Dream combines them and both work a lot better than the alternation of verses in Fortress.

In fact, Into the Light is the point where this album grabbed me. I'm used to these Dawn of Solace albums taking a while to take firm root in my brain. That happened with both Waves and Flames of Perdition and it happened here too. First time through, it sounded good but ephemeral, with nothing sticking. Second time through, Into the Light stood up for attention. Third time through, it s all started to take hold and I was relishing riffs and melodies like they were old favourites. Why it takes me a few listens with Dawn of Solace, I don't know, because that usually happens with much more complex music than this, but it happens nonetheless.

Whatever the reason, Into the Light is the first gem. Murder opens up capably enough but it also ends rather unsatisfyingly, just wandering out of the door as if it doesn't think we're paying any attention to it. Fortress is decent enough too, but seems to missing something. Into the Night is perfectly formed, with an achingly slow beat in the verses that stays achingly slow even when an entirely different beat leaps into action alongside it. Somehow it's doomy and urgent all at once and that makes it fascinating. Add a strong melodic line and those two voices working very nicely together and it becomes quite the track.

It's followed by another gem in Rival, which is so effortlessly elegant that it seems to be carved out of mahogany. If there's some My Dying Bride to be found in Into the Light, there's plenty of Paradise Lost in Rival, especially in the guitarwork during the first minute. Then it drops away to create a sense of space for Heikkilä's delicious voice to explore the way we expect from someone like Soen. And then everything builds powerfully, all the more so on Invitation, into gothic metal crunch like we'd expect from Lacrimas Profundere but with those hints at doom/death that come especially from Saukkonen's vocals.

Put all that together and the result a heady mix that's right up my alley. Everything that follows is decent at the very least, the first two songs being the weakest for me, but the best of them sit at the heart of the album, especially Into the Light and Rival but with Invitation on their heels. It plays consistently from there, with Perennial perhaps playing up the doom/death even more and the closer, Mother Earth, following suit with a minute and a half of soothing electronica tacked onto the end to fade out the album. Nothing here lasts past five minutes, including Mother Earth, if we discount that outro.

And so this is another strong album from Dawn of Solace that took me a few listens to fully grasp. I'll figure out why one day. For now, I just let it play and feel very little, let it play again and feel a little more, let it play a third time and suddenly it's right up my alley and I wondering why it took me so long to realise it. What are the odds that album number five, probably due after the next from Before the Dawn and Wolfheart releases, works exactly the same way? Pretty good, I think.

Thursday, 2 January 2025

Ravencrown - Relive the Imagination (2025)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

What better to kick off a new year than a Finnish gothic metal band that I haven't heard before? In fact, I don't believe I've heard anything by main man Markus Jussila before, either from Mournful Lines or Kituma. This may be a sort of continuation of the former, playing as often in rock territory as metal, but I won't know for sure without checking out that band, who apparently split in 2024. It just seems clear to me that this is driven by its keyboard melodies, even though it often chunks up with some guitar crunch. The vocals are clean and higher than I tend to expect for a male voice in a gothic band. Overall, I think it sits on the metal side of that ever tenuous boundary with rock but it wouldn't take much to shift it to the other side.

That foundation in melody is obvious immediately on the opener, From the Moment, and it rarely ceases to be the focus, remaining whatever else the band is doing. I say band, but it's Jussila doing everything except whatever guitarwork his Mournful Lines colleague Juha Tervo contributes. The final three songs play a little heavier, Will You? especially getting epic and My Sweet Serpentine a more traditional goth song with an unknown deeper voice joining in duet, but they're still built on melody. Dreams & Hearts opens like a pop song, down to some diva crooning from Jussila, but it's still built on melody. Even Loveless Pyre, which veers firmly into prog rock, is still built on melody.

That introduces two of my favourite angles to this album, but not the third, which is an unexpected steampunk flavour. I have no reason to believe that Jussila intended that specifically, especially as it isn't echoed in lyrics, but it's there rather often. It's there in Loveless Pyre when the keyboards mimic violins and bells that sound like clockwork. It's there in the filters on In Autumn's Embrace's intro which throw everything back to a previous era. And it's there in the opening to Sorrow, which sounds like a harpsichord. Of course, steampunk is more of an aesthetic in music than a genre and that isn't apparent, so take this paragraph how you will.

The first is that prog element in Loveless Pyre. It's the longest song on this album by far, six and a half minutes running a couple more than anything else here, most of the tracks done and dusted in a radio friendly three minutes or so. That allows it to have the longest and most substantial break into an instrumental section and that in turn allows it to get more versatile and inventive. Oddly, I wasn't convinced at all on a first listen, not being sure if I even liked half of it but loving the other half anyway. It does a heck of a lot and it keeps changing as it goes. A couple more listens and this one was my clear favourite.

The songs that sit behind it all show up late, maybe starting with Hollow Anyway but certainly with Zero. Hollow Anyway is slower and more sedate but it finds a strong groove and milks it well. Zero follows suit, adding an epic heaviness that Will You? matches. These two play like symphonic gothic metal and would benefit only from a full orchestra over Jussila's keyboard orchestrations, which I expect wasn't in the budget. They sound great to me and it's hard not to imagine them washing to shore like the waves on the cover art.

The closer is the most traditional gothic rock song on the album, My Sweet Serpentine, and I'd love to know who the guest voice is. Whoever it is sounds great but also sounds deep in the way that we tend to expect any goth rock frontman to sound when singing clean. It isn't merely the deep voice that plays traditionally, the whole drive of the song follows suit. It wouldn't stretch imagination to hear other Finnish gothic rock bands like HIM or the 69 Eyes covering this and it fitting in their set.

There are five or six songs in between Loveless Pyre and the driving songs at the end of the album but they're all worthwhile to varying degrees. I'm not much of a fan of the crooning on Dreams & Hearts but the hook is particularly strong and the guitar solo builds off it very well indeed. I only wish that solo had been longer. I Feel the Emptiness adds a Latin guitar feel, enough that Jussila could have sung it in Spanish and it would have felt natural. It features another effortless melody on the keyboards.

My biggest query about these songs in the middle is why Sorrow was given the single treatment, given that it was the only one and it's hardly the strongest song here. While I'd call out Loveless Pyre as the best song, it's clear to me that My Sweet Serpentine is the single. The only reason that I'm seeing why it wasn't chosen is that it may actually be an old Mournful Lines song redone here, so not new music in the strictest sense.

Whether it is or it isn't, Ravencrown are a decent new band to me for the new year, one to deepen the already deep pool of talent in Finland and add to their thriving gothic rock/metal scene. I will take all the good I can find in 2025 and I'm thankful it started out with my first album review of the year.

Thursday, 26 September 2024

Alkonost - Дар Саламандры (2024)

Alkonost are another of those bands who have been around for a long time without me noticing. They formed in Nabarezhnye Chelny in the Republic of Tatarstan in 1996 and have knocked out at least twelve albums, most of them in Russian but with a couple seeing additional release in the English language. This isn't one of them, but it comes a year after an Anniversary Edition of their debut, a previously cassette-only English language album, Songs of the Eternal Oak. The core of the band is founding member Andrey Losev, who writes the songs and plays guitar and keyboards.

What I'm hearing is that all those roles are fundamental here, making him the heart and soul of what this band does. The guitar is a heavy crunch that sets the fundamental tone for everything. It's a rhythmic guitar that's more interested in echoing a beat than delivering a riff and there are few guitar solos to be found. The melodies here are primarily the province of the vocals, which are provided by Ksenia Pobuzhanskaya, but the keyboards often emphasise her when she sings and in moments when she doesn't, they often take over from her.

If I'm reading things correctly, Pobuzhanskaya is the only other actual member of Alkonost, with an array of guests fleshing out the line-up for this album, even though some of them have credits on earlier releases. Vadim Grozov plays the bass throughout, but other duties are split up by song. I see three drummers, with Dmitry Bortsov possibly the most frequent presence, appearing on five of the nine tracks. There are two guest guitarists but only on a couple of tracks, both showing up on Северное сияние, or Northern Lights, and Pavel Kosolapov playing on Оберег, or Amulet, too. That leaves Andrey Tepper as the violinist on Оберег.

I liked this album pretty quickly, even though it plays out in a highly consistent manner, so it's hard to pick out favourite songs. If you like one, you're going to like all of them, but if you don't like the one you started with, nothing else is going to change your mind. Maybe Оберег is notably playful for a couple of minutes, that violin joining keyboards and vocals before the crunch joins in. Maybe the second half of Разожги огонь, or Light the Fire, elevates it through a strong hook, some free flying ethnic-sounding vocals from Pobuzhanskaya and some technical guitar changes. And maybe Солнце, or Sun, has an even better hook. Quite frankly, though, I could easily call out some aspect of every song to say something special about it, without it having any more meaning.

What that boils down to is that this plays best not as nine songs, but as a single forty plus minute slab of folk metal. It's a very easy album to listen to and I've listened to it for the past three weeks as I've been distracted away from music reviews by a hundred other urgent tasks until I finally got it down on virtual paper. However, it's felt just as good every time I've come back to it partly due to having a welcoming warmth to it. In fact, that welcome may be one reason why it reminded me of a song from a short film I've screened at events that's both gothic and steampunk, both highly welcoming communities.

Coincidentally, that film is also Russian, titled Corset and written and directed by Olga Twighlight in 2015, but the song, Set Me Free, is from a German electro-industrial band, In Strict Confidence. Listening to that afresh, the guitar crunch seems very similar to what I'm hearing from Alkonost and their use of keyboards isn't wildly different either, so it's hardly surprising to realise that I'd heard this as both gothic and steampunk, even though it's not really either. What's different are the vocals, because Pobuzhanskaya is emphatically rooted in folk music while In Strict Confidence remain stubbornly gothic.

And that means that, while Losev is the bedrock of this band, it's Pobuzhanskaya who becomes the one who gives it its identity. She only ever sings clean and in a folky voice that ranges from playful soprano down to sultry contralto. The latter is her default voice, but Оберег especially highlights both sides of her range, reminding me of a versatile Russian pop singer called Линда, or Linda, a singer who also dipped into both folk music and goth. I'd love to hear Alkonost cover anything off Ворона, especially the title track.

Clearly I should be listening to more Alkonost. On another day, I might have given this a solid 7/10 because it's a consistently enjoyable album. Today, I'm going with an highly recommended 8/10 as it's become quite the companion over a few weeks and it still feels just as good now as it did on my first time through. A lot of otherwise wonderful albums age quickly but this one feels just as fresh as it always did. I wonder if I'll find the same with their earlier material. I may need to find out. The title translates to The Gift of the Salamander, so, hey, thank you, salamander!

Monday, 16 October 2023

Erode of Sadness - Enlivened (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Symphonic Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Oct 2023
Sites: Metal Archives | VK

OK, there's a lot here, especially early on, so I had to start afresh to make sure I was working from the right page. Vampire Coven is a forty-nine second intro that obviously plants the album's feet in gothic territory. The first track proper, The Dark Times, backs that up but initially does so using an entirely orchestral approach. The band eventually join in to add metal crunch but the vocals we hear are truly operatic in a way I haven't heard since Nova Malà Strana back in the nineties. They come courtesy of Vladislava Solovyova who doesn't just deliver a clean soprano like so many other female vocalists in symphonic metal bands; she actually sings opera.

This opener is a clear highlight, Solovyova's operatic delivery being wonderfully contrasted by the clean but dark vocals of Sinner Apollo. The worst thing about the song is that it ends and relatively quickly, under three and a half minutes into something I hoped would be an epic. What's important is that Apollo is the actual vocalist in Erode of Sadness and Solovyova is merely a welcome guest, a side opportunity to her own band, a symphonic metal band called Rabies that I'm especially eager to seek out to see how she sounds there. It's an odd choice, to bring in a guest lead vocalist on the first proper track on a debut album, because it gives the wrong impression, but it's a great song.

There's another guest vocalist, also female, but she doesn't show up until Supernova Remnant, so there are three tracks for Apollo to enforce his presence as the actual lead singer.

He sounds excellent and underlines that the core sound of this band is gothic not symphonic, even though orchestration continues to play a major part in the sound, especially the violins which start out Blood and Grace and are pivotal in Lie to Me. The other important note to make is that Apollo shifts to a harsh voice at points, unless there's another member of the band who steps up at those points to add further contrast. Certainly there's a section in Lie to Me where both clean and harsh voices sing together, an easy enough effect to achieve in post-production but not so easily in a live environment.

That other guest is Evgenia Frantseva, the singer for doom/death metal band Odium Throne, who sings clean here with an almost hoarse emphasis, while Apollo varies between clean voice, harsh voice and an electronically manipulated effect. I love these variations from the band's core sound, though, of course, they're most obvious on the two songs with guests, however often the choir has opportunity to vary the tone. There are thirteen tracks on this album, along with a bonus track and two intros, so Apollo gets eleven plus one and guests get two. It may not help that, as excellent as he is, I'm still thinking of this band as best with both male and female vocals.

But I need to review the album I'm listening to not the album that I'm imagining given one track on it. Apollo's voice is deep and rich, very much in the Andrew Eldritch tradition but with melody more like Finnish gothic rock bands like HIM and 69 Eyes. These songs certainly bear that influence but a heavier one too, from bands a little further afield like Lacrimas Profundere. There's an occasional shift into much heavier territory too, like on Blood from the Cross, which increases the tempo and prompts plenty of grit in Apollo's voice even when he's not singing harsh. If Erode of Sadness often drop into gothic rock on some other songs, this is the most gothic metal they get.

Given that this is a debut album, I wonder where they'll move stylistically. It feels like the majority of songs are gothic rock with rich male vocals, orchestration and hints at harshness, so maybe that will be the whole of their next album. Maybe, though, it's where they started and they grew into a more metallic sound that verges on extreme metal in those harsh vocals and the urgency of Blood from the Cross. Maybe The Dark Times has always been an anomaly, with Solovyova invited not for a general expansion of sound but just because she was there and could add something to it.

Who knows? I certainly don't, but I'll be keeping an eye open for that second album to find out.

Tuesday, 25 July 2023

Mortal Blood - Fate's Overture (2023)

Following on from yesterday, here's another EP containing five tracks, though it really isn't, given that it's over half an hour in length. Dan Krell, the musician behind everything here, as composer, performer and producer, may well think of it as an EP but I'm thinking of it as a full length album. Maybe he sees it as not substantially longer than its predecessor, last year's Unholy Feast, which was three minutes shorter. I think my criteria nowadays is whether it's longer than Reign in Blood or not, so that counts as an EP and this an album. Is there a better guide?

Krell infuses this with an interesting sound from moment one. It's advertised as gothic doom and I can't argue with that, but there's a band that sprang out of this immediately for me that doesn't feature on the influence list on Mortal Blood's EPK and that's Celtic Frost. It's most obvious in the vocals, which are delivered in a tortured style that reminds me of their Monotheist album, a dying god sort of voice that has to be distorted because it's more vast than our comprehension, speaking to us from beyond whatever veil separates men and gods, even dying ones.

The music behind it isn't as slow or as bleak, though it does fit both of those adjectives, even if the drums constantly suggest that everything else should speed up. It's more patient than aching and the bleakness is tempered by richer guitars. It's the guitars that add a gothic feel, but even when they try to soar, the vocals chain them back down again, even if they're just rumbling rather than delivering verses. I never caught lyrics here but I got the mood immediately and the voice keeps it mired in that mood.

Speaking to Krell's cited influences, I can hear a bunch of them here. There's some Candlemass in the majestic drive of Fury and Sorrow. There's some Paradise Lost in the more gothic guitar parts from Fate's Overture onwards, especially A Monster Approaches. There's some My Dying Bride in the sonic assault during the second half of Fury and Sorrow and the melancholic flow of A Monster Approaches. If there's any Gorgoroth here, it's in the vocals. I'm not hearing much Mercyful Fate, Dark Tranquillity or Amon Amarth. This is less theatrical and more soundscape, crew rather than cast.

It's as a soundscape generator that it's most successful, an approach that brings us right back to a Celtic Frost comparison, with the vocals leading the way. Krell's voice stays tortured throughout, fascinatingly so. It's primarily that vocal that makes this so ruthlessly uncommercial, in a way that we might associate otherwise with black metal, but almost every other instrument follows suit, an exception obvious only for the drums, which mostly pander to convention with double bass. All the influences Krell cites maintained a level of commerciality in their sound, even if it was just through melody. Mortal Blood has no interest doing that, just as the Frosties never did anything that they didn't want to do, even if it turned out to be a misstep.

Now, I'm a big Celtic Frost fan, going all the way back to their Hellhammer days, so I'm on board for this approach. However, I like the first three songs a lot more than the fourth, A Hell Dream, though it is growing on me. It's a little less focused than the others, which anchor the searching gothic guitarwork with the tortured vocals. It finds itself late, but it takes a while and it lost me a little as it got there, with guitars that know exactly what they're doing but drums that feel unsure. The final track, Empower the Warrior, finds itself immediately but it has a different feel, even using the same component parts. It plays to me like a black/doom metal take on a punk song, simple at its heart but weighed down by textures.

I like this but I appreciate the unconventional and uncompromising. Krell has a particular musical vision and he's focused on that so emphatically and singlemindedly that it's almost surprising that he acknowledged the real world by releasing this material. It's going to find people and many will hate it. However, the few who appreciate its sound will also appreciate its integrity. Even when it's at its most commercial, perhaps on A Monster Approaches, it refuses to play ball with anyone but Krell himself. It is what it is and that's all that should matter. I dig that.

Tuesday, 25 April 2023

Elysion - Bring Out Your Dead (2023)

Country: Greece
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 17 Mar 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

Elysion are new to me but they've been around for a long time, even though this is only their third album, arriving almost a decade after its predecessor, Someplace Later in 2014. They're prominent enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there's not much there. They're from Athens, built around a couple of guitarists, and they've held a pretty stable line-up since their formation in 2006. The only change since their early days is Andreas Roufagalas stepping on bass last year to replace founder member Antonios Bofilakis.

They play gothic metal, but with a very commercial, alt rock edge. This isn't old school gothic metal drenched in velvet and mahogany and with either a deep and resonant male voice or a beauty and the beast contrast. There's little here that's reminiscent of Tristania or Lacrimas Profundere. It's radio friendly gothic metal, like Evanescence but heavier, so maybe more like modern Lacuna Coil. It's built out of simple but effective crunchy riffs and led by a clean and powerful female voice that knows exactly how to turn on the emphasis. It's telling that this seems to be metal over rock, but I do not see a page for the band at Metal Archives.

Blink of an Eye is a strong opener that never lets up. Crossing Over adds more commercial sheen. Raid the Universe adds samples and more electronica. Those three, between them, provide the band's sound in a nutshell and all three of them sound good. This is a very easy album to listen to, as if an initial listen is actually a tenth or twentieth time through. I'm sure that's very deliberate through careful songwriting, because the music behind Christiana Hatzimihali's voice is thoroughly simple, designed to underpin her rather than to show off. Sure, Nikos Despotopoulos manages to carve a little space out of songs for decent guitar solos, but then it's swiftly back to the vocals.

Frankly, this lives or dies on those vocals and what balance Hatzimihali can find between melody and power. The verses are all melody and they build to the title or the chorus or whatever's there to stand out just a bit more than the verses, with Hatzimihali turning on that emphasis for effect too. As long as she does that, and she manages it consistently across the album, then this is good stuff and a whole slew of these ten tracks ought to find themselves friendly to radio stations.

The question you need to ask yourselves, if you're into gothic metal of any description, is whether that's enough for you and that's because there's not a lot more here. Blink of an Eye does tease a little, with a decent guitar solo and a teasing operatic voice soaring behind whispers at one point. I like the keyboard work that's mostly confined in the background to Crossing Over. Those are the first two tracks here, so it's all promising for a while, but there's not much else added after that, so, if you're looking for more than crunchy guitars and powerful female vocals, the songs will blur together somewhat. Was that a sample during This Time? I probably dreamed it.

And that puts this album in an odd place. Because it's so consistent in approach, these songs serve as variations on a simple theme and that means that, after a couple of times through, there was a lack of anything to keep me paying attention and it all faded into the background, maybe a guitar solo or vocal line pulling back here and there. However, the songs, as simple as they are, never got old, so that, even when this became background ambience, I was still listening on some level and it entertained me.

I ended up thinking of it like a dentist's surgery. You know when you're lying there, waiting for the numbing agent to work and all you can do is listen to the radio station to which they're tuned. If it's a good one, then you feel OK because whatever pain you're in will soon be gone and you can listen to good music until then. If it's a bad one, then you feel uncomfortable, as if you're being confined against your will and you're already failing to manage the ordeal even before the dentist arrives. This album would serve as a good radio station for my next visit.

Thursday, 20 April 2023

The Black Harvest - Mortuary Dogma (2023)

Country: Chile
Style: Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 29 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

I've been listening to this album for a few days now as I wrap up some books for publication and it's soaked into my skin. It feels immersive to me, the beat steady rather than slow and the production excellent. The music reminds me of Winds of Sirius, who put out an amazing album back in 1999 and vanished, but with production that the French band could only dream of. Every component is easy to follow, so we can go to ground with the dirty bass and rhythm guitar and watch the clean lead a long way above us, soaring in beauty. The vocals move between the two.

The Black Harvest have been around for a long time, formed as far back as 2004, though it took ten years to get round to a demo. That may be because it was initially a much smaller project, with the guitarist today, who goes by D.b, playing every instrument and M.v providing vocals over the top. I see that line-up on both demos, but it fleshed out in 2016 to a full band. I'm not sure when current vocalist Jorge Quilape joined, but everyone else showed up at that point, so they've been solid for seven years now.

I haven't heard their debut album, a self-titled effort in 2017, but this feels like exactly the sort of thing that should show up after a six year wait because it's well worth waiting for. The opener is a strong way to start and it establishes a sound, just as any self-titled song ought to, but Torment of the Damned promptly takes it all up a notch. This is an epic, almost ten minutes in length, and it's one to really sink our teeth into, from the tasty opening riff into the echoing opening guitar solo. It feels exactly right to the degree that if I played you ten seconds from it at random, you'd be able to tell me where in the song I'm at. That's a breakdown in the midsection. That's the home stretch with everything doubling down on the groove. That's soon in, as the intro gives way to a build and the song starts to grow.

The more I hear this album, the more I love it, but that goes double for Torment of the Damned. It keeps throwing out fresh details that I didn't notice before, little touches in the background that don't do much individually but do something that deepens the song just a little and those touches add up to a heck of a lot once it's all said and done. Nothing else here matches its length but these don't tend to be short. Insurrection Path at the heart of the album is only four and a half minutes long, putting it a couple of minutes shy of anything else. Theater of Blood comes closest to being a second epic at eight and a half, which ought to count.

There are five musicians in the band and they all play a key part. Lino Contreras is excellent behind the drumkit, but what he does is emphasised by the bass of Manuel Vera Barria and especially the rhythm guitar of Moisés Alvarado, which is a wonderful contrast to the lead guitar of D.b. The lead is always clean and it soars and sustains, in the style of Paradise Lost's Gregor Mackintosh, echoing over the other instruments. Alvarado, however, plays a vicious rhythm that's built from edges and dirt and grittiness. When he's laying down a riff and D.b's soaring over him, as happens often, the contrast is magnificent. I'd almost call it the signature sound of the Black Harvest. I'm not sure if I prefer that stretch on Insurrection Path or The Succubi Delight.

And that leaves Quilape, who underlines how genre-fluid the band are. This is doom/death, with a doom pace and a death bite, but it often moves into gothic metal. Part of that is inherent in those Paradise Lost comparisons, but Quilape emphasises it. He alternates between a death growl, that feels warm and neatly rumbling, and a deep resonant clean voice. There's some Nick Holmes in his delivery but plenty of Andrew Eldritch too and something that reminded me of a powerful monk who renounced his faith to sing darker rituals. That's at the fore during the first half of Theater of Blood, before Quilape shifts back to his death growl halfway.

Perhaps most important of all, the combination of all the above may work on individual songs but continues to work throughout the album, with every song in contention for a highlight, so that the best song becomes the one that you're listening to at any particular moment. Each one of the five musicians also has multiple moments to take the spotlight without anyone appearing to show off. Contreras remains the solid backbone to the band but even he gets moments, like the very end of From Flesh to Ashes. It may be the simplest thing he's done on the album but it stands out.

And that means that this is another 8/10 for what's been a tasty week. Notably, all three of my 8s have come from the lesser known bands I'm reviewing first before a more established band. That seems telling.

Thursday, 9 February 2023

Dark Princess - Phoenix (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2023
Sites: Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | VK

If I'm understanding correctly, Dark Princess was formed in 2004 as a solo project for lead vocalist Olga Trifonova, who may have created the first album on her own. However, there was certainly a band for the second album, which is when Stepan Zuev arrived on keyboards and backing vocals. It looks like they released four albums in total before splitting up in 2017, though Trifonova actually left after three, so the fourth is with a different lead vocalist, Natalia Terekhova. She returned in 2020 when the band reformed with a new line-up to support Trifonova and Zuev, each new member recruited from the latter's other band, Sangvis, who play melodic death metal and metalcore.

This is the first product of the new line-up and it's a far cry from those genres. This is gothic metal, mostly heavier than we'd call gothic rock but with occasional dips back to that side of the fence, at points when electronica joins in and the drum sound shifts. The intro to The Pain I Need adds violin too and could have been taken from a Dead Can Dance album. The song settles into rock and then heavies up to metal, before ramping back down to that intro sound at the end. That's not unusual for this album.

Generally speaking, the album aims at the elegance of gothic music, everything on offer polished mahogany and brass, with a clean symphonic metal lead vocal from Trifonova. Zuev doesn't join in on every song and how he does so depends on the material. He showcases a harsh vocal in support on the opening title track and especially on Falling to Fly, but he's also able to shift to a clean vocal, as he does on The Light and My Chance, to name but two. On a first listen, it was the heavier songs where he stood out most, but gradually I realised he was there a lot more than I'd initially heard.

I can see why this used to be a solo project, because Trifonova is certainly the most obvious aspect of the band's sound and almost everything else seems to be there to support it. That extends to an odd lack of opportunities for the backing musicians to move into the spotlight and shine. There's a decent guitar solo on Taste of Freedom from Denis Burkin that almost surprised me and there's a strange break between it and the rest of the song, as if they had no idea how to connect the two in a seamless manner, so just stopped and started again. The similar solo on The Light doesn't segue well either but it's much more effective, both as a solo and as part of a song.

Of course, then there's another solo on the next song, My Chance, which is shorter but seamlessly integrated, and then another one on Your Flame that's likewise, with a reprise no less, and it feels all of a sudden that this is a guitar band. However, once the solos are over, the guitar is lowered in the mix and we're back to a predominantly vocal outlook. And that's fine, but my biggest concern here is in the lack of hooks. Trifonova sounds wonderful and everything she does is melody but I'm not going to be waking up in the morning with any of these songs playing in my head and that's even more important if the focus is going to be so ruthlessly on the vocals.

What I found most odd here was that my favourite songs are the heaviest and the lightest. Anyone who's read a lot of my reviews won't be surprised to hear the former because, while I like bands to vary what they do and keep their albums interesting, I also dig the heavy stuff. However, the latter is a lot more unusual. I don't dislike soft and subtle music and I don't dislike ballads as a matter of course, but I do tend to be less fond of lighter material on heavier albums, which is Not Enough in a nutshell.

However, I'd place it alongside Falling to Fly, with all those harsh backing vocals, as my highlights here, because Trifonova is a delight and in her element in an aria that allows her to exercise some more subtle elements of her talent, like intonation and playing with emphasis. The orchestration behind her isn't entirely unpredictable but it has some nice subtleties to it too. That it heavies up in the third act is merely a bonus. It would have been a highlight for me even if it hadn't.

I wanted a little more from this album than the band seemed willing to give, but it's a decent and welcome return for a band who have been gone from the studio for over a decade.

Wednesday, 2 November 2022

Lacrimas Profundere - How to Shroud Yourself with Night (2022)

I've been listening to this album, a hopefully lucky thirteenth for a band I enjoyed immensely back at the turn of the century, for a few days now and it's grown on me considerably. My first listen was a little underwhelming but each subsequent run through has improved its stature until I'm having trouble now moving onto the next release in my review queue. However, as much as I enjoy each of the ten individual tracks on offer, their hooks now old friends, this still plays to me as one complete forty minute chunk of doomladen gothic metal rather than a bunch of songs.

Mostly, that's because this is so utterly consistent. Wall of Gloom sets things in motion in style, an agreeably dense mood floating around the pleading vocals of Julian Larre, who had debuted very effectively on 2019's excellent Bleeding the Stars. Those vocals aren't just emotional; they actively reach out to us, involving us in the stories each song has to tell, each of which revolves in some way around the album's theme of being able to step back and disappear, understandable during these troubled times.

The riffs are dark and doomy, but there's a decadent gothic veneer draped over everything. It's all mood and it contributes to the density of this sound, because it isn't just heavy in musical terms, it feels heavy like it's handmade out of polished mahogany and deep velvet that have weight both in the physical sense and in weight of time. They've seen a lot. Much of this comes from the backdrop that hints at storms and fog and other things that can cloak us from the eyes of the world, as only a little creature easily vanished into the grandeur of creation.

That's there on The Vastness of Infinity, where it ought to be, but it's there throughout. That track stands out a little because it returns the album to its core sound after a couple of songs varying it just a little. The first four songs here are all outstanding but do a very similar job in a very similar way, from Wall of Gloom to In a Lengthening Shadow. They're all exactly like what I suggested over my last couple of paragraphs. But The Curtain of White Silence has a different vocal approach and Unseen another. I much prefer the latter to the former and, while it's tough to pick out favourites here, it's safe to say that that's my least favourite.

What The Curtain of White Silence does is take Larre's emotional vocal style and throw it through an emo filter. It's still emotional but it shifts from elegant pleading to unsophisticated whining. It isn't a good shift, though it doesn't clash with the music behind it. Maybe children of the nineties may dig it a lot more than I do. Unseen goes in the other direction, heavying the vocal up to more of a growl, underlining how a lot of this sound is the sort of gothic metal that evolved from doom/death. To Disappear in You has a neat double vocal, mixing the clean with the harsh and allowing both to continue in their way. These work a lot better for me.

And they lead the way to the final couple of tracks, which are up there with the first four. In fact, if I could ever truly separate these songs out to be able to think of them in isolation, I might suggest An Invisible Beginning as my highlight, with Shroud of Night, the kinda sorta title track, not much of a trek behind it. The catch is that I then roll back around to listen through the album again and find how much I dig Wall of Gloom and A Cloak Woven in Stars and suddenly it's all about how well this plays as an album rather than individual songs.

After a dozen listens, I'd call out the first four and the last two songs as the highlights, which is an impressive amount. They're all heavy and dense and emotional, but they also carry strong hooks, similar ones for sure but strong ones nonetheless. They all take me back to my days in Halifax and the rise of Paradise Lost from doom/death pioneers through gothic metal pioneers to heavy icons dabbling in the new wave. There's a lot from a few of those eras here, but combined into a gothic metal style that's much richer than the bleak sound of Paradise Lost's Gothic album. That's where Lacrimas Profundere live and I couldn't be happier.

Tuesday, 23 August 2022

Agathodaimon - The Seven (2022)

I haven't heard Agathodaimon since my EMusic days a couple of decades ago when I discovered an array of favourites on Napalm Records. It's been long enough that I don't remember exactly what they sounded like but I believe that they've evolved a little from more symphonic black metal into a gothic flavour of black metal. Both those sounds are in evidence on the opener, La Haine, which starts out as a grandiose form of black metal but shifts midway to a more emotional gothic sound midway, and it's a highly appropriate way to kick things off.

Initially, the black metal side of this bled through the deepest and I liked it, even though it didn't blow me away. Gradually, the gothic side of it came into focus and I liked it more, with the harsher black metal side an interesting contrast to keep this heavy. Gothic metal can often feel like gothic rock simply heavied up somewhat but this never feels like it's anything but metal, the harsh voices and frantic drums an unmistakable manifesto of extreme metal and their agreeable taint always floats there keeping its evil eye on us, even when the sound gets slower, richer and darker.

The song that emerged as a standout first was Wolf Within, which again starts out black but finds its way to a more evocative gothic sound, with a strong riff and an ambience of whispers, even before the achingly slow and dark section. There's some sort of narration late in the song that sounds like it's delivered by a pissed off witch. Maybe it's a sample and maybe not, but it's evocative however it was sourced. Putting all those elements together makes this quite the potent song.

And, while I'm not sure anything else here matches it, others gradually highlight similar qualities. I rather like the middle of the album, Mother of All Gods and Estrangement the logical end to one side and the beginning of the other. The former is the better song but the latter is interesting, as it's the least black metal song on offer, though there's plenty of double bass drumming going on and it keeps on speeding up until its finale. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the most gothic, because the rich textures evident elsewhere don't show up much at all.

In fact, there's more velvet and mahogany in the sub-two minute prelude to In My Dreams which follows it than in this entire song, with In My Dreams proper kicking off with neat whispered sonic cobwebs before launching into a faster and more frantic tempo. The question really becomes what songs are the best place to start for the new listener. I'd say start with La Haine, just as the album does, and, if you like what you hear, follow up with a double bill of Wolf Within and In My Dreams (Part 2 - In Bitterness). If you're not convinced by them, this isn't for you. If you are, then you're all set and you can explore from there.

Oddly, my least favourite song is the one they've made a video for, which is Kyrie / Gloria. It seems too deliberate for me, as the spotlight section runs too long, a sonorous gothic voice playing a sort of counter to a variety of voices, some shrieky, others very different. It's an interesting idea, but it didn't work for me and the rest of the song doesn't make up for it. That's probably down to choice, which is a personal thing, so you may dig it. The band are very capable, so this ends up being about how the black metal merges with the symphonic and gothic aspects and which songs do that best.

I certainly like Agathodaimon more as a gothic metal band than a black metal one and, while they're a bit more of the latter than the former, they're moving my way. I would suggest that it'll be interesting to see how they develop over their next couple of albums, but they haven't been particularly busy of late. They split up in 2014, after a couple of decades as a band and half a dozen studio albums to their name, but they got back together in 2020 and this is the first output since then. So, welcome back, folks! The Seven is their seventh album. Let's hope it's a lucky one for them.

Thursday, 14 July 2022

Drift into Black - Earthtorn (2022)

I liked this album by New Jersey-based Drift into Black from the outset but not immensely, until it grew on me, which almost came as a surprise. They're on their fourth album, even though they've only been a band since 2017, and they tend to be described as gothic doom, which isn't unfair. They certainly fit into doom metal, their tempo slow and doomy. The gothic side isn't as overt but it's a noticeable angle when it vanishes, as it does briefly in On Borrowed Time, when its layers cascade away to expose the doom below. It's there in a melancholy tone but also through use of piano and violin, albeit not as often as I'd have liked.

However, those components don't add up to Drift into Black, because there's progressive metal in this sound too and it gets more and more important as the album runs on, to the point where it's a driving force. There's prog in the prominent display of keyboards, which often comes across like prog rock rather than prog metal, but also in the way the guitars build and the sometimes copious use of sound effects. There are samples here too, not used frequently within the album, but in the intro, Good Mourning Earth, which collates a slew of pivotal news moments. They're negative and mostly American (9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Challenger explosion) with only Hitler representing the rest of the world.

I think the songwriting often comes out of prog metal too, especially on more subdued songs, like The Ups and the Downs, or in more subdued sections of others. After them, even far more overtly gothic doom tracks, like Weight of Two Worlds, feel like they still have a prog metal component to their construction, especially as they evolve into something else. The man to ask would seem to be Craig Rossi, the only songwriter here, who is also the band's guitarist and keyboardist and, I think, both of its lead vocalists.

I say both because there are two male vocalists here and one female, though the latter is a guest, Melissa Hancock, who elevates a handful of tracks by adding a further contrast to the one that the male vocalists provide. One of those is clean and one harsh and I'm not entirely sure which is seen as the lead. Early on, I'd say the harsh vocal is the lead, because it's easily more prominent and it has a confidence to it that the clean vocal doesn't, seemingly content to serve in the background. As the album runs on, though, it seems to gradually acquire that confidence and eventually take over.

I prefer the clean voice, especially when it wants to be the lead. It's a decent voice and one that's able to be far more flexible than the harsh voice, which is mostly a texture, often a rhythmic one. It's limited in its delivery, so it struggles to do more than simply be the harsh contrast to the clean voice. It's almost entirely monotone and it plods, with little shift in pitch and little enunciation. It manages a little nuance later in the album, but mostly relies on the clean voice to handle any sort of melody or engagement. Sometimes it increases its urgency, but that's about it.

And so we focus more on the instrumentation, which is excellent and won me over far sooner than the vocals. The elegant electronica on the intro starts that and some neat, Queensrÿche-esque prog metal guitar tone on It Fell from the Sky adds to it, along with the contrast in vocal styles which is emphasised by the musical shifts in sections. At this point, the music outstrips the vocals, though the introduction of Hancock's voice on The March to Oblivion helps balance that a little, until the clean voice truly takes the lead with The Ups and the Downs and we reevaluate what we're actually hearing. Ghost on the Shore is just an interlude, but a tasty electronically focused one that allows us to refresh and see what's left in a new light.

The more we listen, the more we catch the nice touches in the background. That's often the violin of Ben Karas, from Windfaerer, but it's the electronica too and other details that sometimes hide in the background waiting to be discovered. There's some really cool jagged stuff going on at the end of It Fell from the Sky, for instance, that I didn't initially notice. Some of it's pretty expected, like the clocks in On Borrowed Time, but some of it not so much, like the tribal percussion behind Left to the Burning Sun.

And so I like this more than I did initially, when that limited harsh vocal tinted my enjoyment until I realised what else is going on here. I'd be interested in hearing those three earlier albums to see how Drift into Black came to this sound and how much it's developed over time.

Wednesday, 1 June 2022

Crematory - Inglorious Darkness (2022)

I reviewed Crematory's fifteenth album, Unbroken, in 2020 and found myself only half convinced by their particular brand of gothic industrial. I liked the songs with their NDH hooks and grand gothic sweeps. What I wasn't so fond of was the death growl of Gerhard Stass and, as that album ran on, I found that I preferred the clean voice of Connie Andreszka, officially a backing vocal but which did take over at points. It didn't bode well to find that Andreszka left the band last year, as did bassist Jason Matthias. He was quickly replaced by Patrick Schmid but it doesn't look like Andreszka was. His role is just gone.

Stass is my biggest problem with this sixteenth album too but he didn't annoy me as much. I ought to go back to Unbroken because it feels like he's toned down his growl a little bit. Having plenty of grit on the more driving songs like Break Down the Walls works well enough, even if his accent is a little obvious when he's singing in English. He feels more natural when singing in German, which is a language that always benefits from a little grit. I do miss the dual vocal styles, Felix Orschel not being particularly obvious in a guest role.

Musically, the songs do much of what they did last time out. Sure, there's an overt evolution in the band's sound over their three decades, but it's not so fast paced as to be particularly noticeable in the couple of years between albums. This is still gothic industrial, with the latter aspect shifting to NDH more and more as time goes by. Rest in Peace has perhaps the most incessant drive of any of the songs here, though it hints back to the death metal origins of the band at points too, but it's a common approach here, evident on almost everything. It's very obvious in Das Ende too.

The gothic is aspect harder to define, as it shows up mostly in the sweep nowadays, some melodies and some keyboards. Even there, Crematory sound more like a goth rock band who heavied up in a NDH fashion rather than a band who started heavy and shifted into gothic metal, which is exactly what they did. They're on Napalm Records now but they're approaching gothic metal from a very different point to many other Napalm acts I fell in love with a couple of decades ago, like Tristania or Sirenia. Even thinking about that, I wonder what a female vocal would do to the band's sound. I can't see it working at all. This is gothic in tone, not in elegance.

Even with Andreszka gone and nobody taking his place, I think this is a step up on Unbroken. It's a shorter album but not so much to be a problem; that last one was highly generous and this is more reasonable at forty-eight minutes. It doesn't outlast its intentions and the eleven songs vary their approaches enough for it to remain fresh throughout. In fact, I wonder if it gets better as it goes. I liked early songs like Break Down the Walls and Rest in Peace, but it seems to pick up with Tränen der Zeit halfway through, a bouncy number with a reliable riff, strong keyboard melodies and a more understated vocal from Stass.

From that point on, everything feels like it's a little more emphatic, a little more focused, a little tighter in intention. I don't think a song like Until We Meet Again is really any better than a Break Down the Walls, but it seems to settle into its groove easier and more naturally. Zur Hölle, with its staccato riff and capable backing vocal, is even quicker to the mark. Again, it's no better or worse than any song from the first half but it thinks it is and sometimes that matters. Maybe Forsaken is a better song, because it's one of my highlights, especially because of Katrin Jüllich's keyboards, a touch that's almost Abba-esque.

All I know is that, each time I listen through, I kind of like the album early on but find myself liking it more and more as it moves forward. Tränen der Zeit perks it up and, by Forsaken, I'm totally on board. However, when I eagerly replay again after Das Ende, well, der Anfang is back to the kinda sorta again and I run through the cycle once more. So this is a 7/10, one up on the previous album, but I'm still interested in figuring out the direction Crematory is taking and whether it's going to impress me more or less.

Friday, 25 March 2022

Thanateros - On Fragile Wings (2022)

I'm always up for a gothic/folk metal band I haven't heard before and Berlin's Thanateros fit that bill even though they've been around as long as the millennium (though they took a decade out in the 2010s. This is their sixth studio album and their second since reforming in 2018. It didn't knock my socks off but it's a reliable release that makes me think about finding those prior albums and what they might sound like. I'd like to know how their sound has developed over time.

On this one, they're a lot more gothic than folk, even though the intro, Kybalion (Time to Fly) is full of folky/tribal elements. Those elements vanish when the songs proper show up. Sure, one of the five musicians in Thanateros, Christof Uhlmann, is credited only on violin but he uses it to lend the band a veneer of elegance, that hand created and hand polished mahogany and brass mindset of the Victorian social elite that's moved so well into steampunk, rather than to spin Thanateros off into folk music.

If there's another genre here beyond gothic, I'd say that it's NDH, because this is music that drives inexorably forward in a way that would be more industrial if it wasn't polished this nicely. In a sort of contradiction to Uhlmann's contributions, sometimes that drive comes through electronics, the two approaches combining in neat fashion as On the Barricades begins. I'm guessing that this is a gothic metal band that started out darkwave and heavied up rather than a metal band who found a particular texture that worked for them. Ben Richter's vocals are clean but with a rasp and I bet that wasn't always the case.

It may not sound particularly promising to suggest that the first song that really grabbed me was We are the Ravens, given that it's seventh here, so perhaps the beginning of the flipside of an LP. However, I enjoyed the album up until that point, even if nothing in it matches how much this one does in its six and a half minutes, making it easily the longest song here except for Nothing Lasts Forever, the album's epic closer, which is a full minute longer.

This one kicks off with the cawing of birds, perhaps rather expectedly given that title, but shifts to an unusual mix of tribal drums, frantic but controlled keyboards and almost chanted vocals. It's an impressive intro, which gives way to the violin and its elegance over flurry, highly appropriate for the subject matter. This may well be my favourite song here with Nothing Lasts Forever coming in a sightly distant second, featuring less coolness but more grandeur, reminding often of Paradise Lost in a Depeche Mode mood.

While none of the shorter songs, which still occupy the four to five and a half minute range, come close to those two longer songs, I do like them. Everything here is catchy and commercial but ever draped in darkness, to underline that this is goth not mainstream, and nothing lets the side down. I'd call out Coven of the Drowned, On the Barricades and Fading for special mention, even though they're different in approach, especially the latter, which occasionally hints at nu metal within its vocal delivery, albeit only in the verses.

There's also quite a lot of it, the album running well past fifty minutes even before we add a bonus track to nudge it even closer to the hour mark. That's another highlight, by the way, a cover of the Kate Bush standard Running Up That Hill, though it's appropriately a bonus. It would steal far too much attention as a regular track. It fits nicely at the end of the album as a perk, after Thanateros have done their thing for so long, almost like an extra encore at a live gig.

Thursday, 27 January 2022

Dawn of Solace - Flames of Perdition (2022)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Jan 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Twitter

I got a real kick out of the Dawn of Solace album, Waves, a couple of years ago. It's a second album rather than a first but it served as a restart to the project, given that fourteen years had elapsed since the debut. I say project rather than band, because it's a side project of Tuomas Saukkonen of gothic death metal band Before the Dawn. Dawn of Solace strips the death away and adds a little doom in its place to play in a more alternative gothic metal framework. Saukkonen contributes all the instrumentation, with Mikko Heikkilä once again stepping in to add vocals over it.

It's solid stuff, but a little more emphatic than last time out. It's heavier than Waves, even when it calms down on a song like the title track, decorated with piano and laden with melancholy, rather than the chugging that shows up in Erase and is especially glorious on Black Shores. I have to point out that Flames of Perdition heavies up too, so that while Waves was often gothic rock as much as gothic metal, this is clearly gothic metal throughout. The knock-on effect that this has is to, if not remove the Soen comparison, to shift it somewhat. I got more of a Tool vibe from the vocals here, especially on the opening couple of tracks. That's not a huge shift, of course, given how much Soen were influenced by Tool, but it's there.

Generally speaking, the mindset is the same though, even if it's heavier. This is a depressive style of music, unsurprisingly given that it mixes gothic with doom, but it's somehow far more upbeat a depressive style than it ought to be. Like Waves, it's the sort of depressive that makes you take a look inside your brain and your heart and reaffirm your connection to life. It's more a comforting reminder that the abyss is there than it is a deep yearning look inside it. The darkness is safely in that abyss, so you can concentrate on living, starting with enjoying this album. Don't panic.

Also like Waves, it sounds OK on a first listen. This isn't music to grab you immediately for flirting, it's music to settle down with and get to know deeply. With each song, it feels closer and truer. It's stronger as it ends than when it began, but we want to let it loop on forever and the beginning is stronger the second time around. That said, while I enjoyed the increased heaviness, I don't think this one's wrapping itself around my soul as much as Waves, which was my album of the month for January 2020, so I think this is a 7/10 for me right now. Maybe it'll grow to another 8/10 over time but, if it does, it's not there yet.

There are some killer tracks here though. Flames of Perdition gets me every time, especially when it heavies up, because that's a wonderful contrast. Skyline stands out for me each time through as well, with its layers of melancholy. It feels like this would be a great song to add harsh vocals to, as a doom/death number, but Heikkilä remains clean throughout. Waves went harsh on one song but this steadfastly resists that urge and it's a good decision. There's only one song here after Skyline, called Serenity, and it's not really a song, more of an outro, but it's a killer too, slow and characterful over a very simple but effective pulsing beat. It leads very nicely into White Noise too, if we loop the album. Which, because this is a Dawn of Solace album, we will.

Thursday, 25 November 2021

Ghost Cries - Purgatorium (2021)

Country: Japan
Style: Symphonic Black/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Nov 2021
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

The Japanese are known for taking things to extremes; whatever it is that you do, there's likely to be someone in Japan doing it more. The latest example of this for me are Ghost Cries from Tokyo, who tend to be listed as symphonic black/death metal and fairly so but, if you're imagining it right now, it's that squared. The best word I can conjure up is "frantic" as this often feels like shred, but with shredding being done on every instrument at once. I haven't felt this overwhelmed since the latest Fleshgod Apocalypse album.

But it works. I listened to Sin of Justice, the opening onslaught, four times, then watched the official video, before continuing onto the rest of the album, just to figure out what they're doing. It's deceptively calm and symphonic a little way into the song, but keyboard runs and drum fills appropriately hint that it's not going to stay that way for a long and, sure enough, the initial vocals signal "go!" in no uncertain terms. No, I don't mean the number five in Japanese, I mean "unleash the kraken!" It's a good thing that this band is so tight, because this could go horribly wrong in so many ways if the musicians weren't up to the challenge. And that's what this song is: a challenge that they meet.

I tried to follow individual instruments in some of those repeat listens, but I kept failing. If I tried to follow the drums, which are so emphatic that it feels as if there are at least two drummers, I'd succeed for a while but suddenly I'd realise that I'd switched my focus to the keyboards without my active brain noticing the change. The two guitars feel like four and the vocals show up in multiple styles, depending on what the song needs. They're clean for two and a half minutes, then there's a harsh verse ending with a gorgeous and well-timed scream that's all the more impactful for not being acknowledged. Rinse and repeat but with a narrative section midway for good measure.

It's amazing to me how the band got all this into one song that's only a breath over seven minutes long. And there are seven more to come. Frankly, just listen to that one. If it's not your thing, then nothing else here is going to remotely convince you, but if it is your thing, then you've bought this already on the basis of that one song along and my job of providing discovery is done and I'm able to shut up now and be done.

Frankly, there isn't much more to say. Ghost Cries describe their sound as "dramatic death metal", focusing on the vocals, the extreme blastbeats and the symphonic atmosphere. I could add that it all serves the purpose of texture. The clean and harsh vocals don't duet or contrast; they're there to meet whatever textural need the song has at any particular point of time. I'd suggest that this holds true for every other element, including the blastbeats and symphonic keyboard overlays, to the degree of the gothic piano that shows up here and there and occasional effects like dripping water that bookend Demigoddess. Everything's there for texture.

And what that means is that nobody's going to pick a favourite song here on the basis of riffs and hooks and melodies. It's all going to come down to the textures that speak to you. For me, it's Sin of Justice and Demigoddess, with the closer, Phantom of the Kingdom, not far behind. You might pick completely different songs and that's fine. We're all different and we like different textures. But, if you like dense, gothic, dramatic music where six people seem to be playing lead at once, I'd suggest that you're going to find your texture here.

Tuesday, 26 October 2021

Cradle of Filth - Existence is Futile (2021)

This ought to be a lucky thirteenth studio album for professional British thorns in the side of society Cradle of Filth. The concept this time is a surprisingly grounded one for them, being, in Dani Filth's words, about "existential terror. The threat of everything. The end of the world, the end of one's life, existential dread." In other words, it speaks to now, the only counter to the negative given being "A little hope, I guess, in there" as well.

And, in keeping with the apocalyptic Hieronymous Bosch-inspired cover art by Arthur Berzinsh, it's an appropriately busy sonic interpretation of our collective demise as a species, trawling in a whole slew of musical influences from across the extreme genre map in characteristic Cradle of Filth style. This is a vibrant apocalypse, one that's impossible to ignore, which is surely much of the point. How come we seem to be so good at ignoring ours?

The Fate of the World on Our Shoulders kicks off the album like the symphonic intro to a horror movie, which is a pretty appropriate way to start. It's a little Hans Zimmer and a little Danny Elfman, epic but playful. Then we move into classic Carl Orff territory. There are Dani Filth's unmistakable vocals. And a bouncy extreme metal hybrid sound that's such a fascinating creature to dissect. It's fast and frenetic but it's built on powerful riffs and fascinating songwriting.

I absolutely adore bands like Cradle of Filth who are simply impossible to stuff into a simple subgenre labelled box. This one comes across a lot like Therion in their heyday combined with a commercial era Satyricon, like an unholy union of Enter Vril Ya and K.I.N.G. But then there's the Zimmer feel to render it epic and a layer of othic texture that's not only overt in the soaring and clean female voice of new fish Anabelle Iratni, who also contributes keyboards and lyre. This apocalypse is draped in velvet just as much as it is blood and fire. It's heavy, of course, and it gets fast at points and faster at others, but it's enticing as well, especially during Discourse Between a Man and His Soul.

So, if you just have to label everything, this could be called epic gothic black heavy symphonic extreme metal. Or something like that. The symphonic is obvious from the very beginning of Existential Terror, the epic gradually takes over as we go and the black manifests itself most obviously during a frenetic chase to the finalé. But even that description isn't enough, because there's almost some exotica early in Necromantic Fantasies. Crawling King Chaos adds church organ and chanting narrative, guitars like buzzsaws in harmony, epochal drumming and vocals like a swarm of murder hornets. There's a heck of a lot to discover here on what has to be the most emphatic Cradle of Filth album in forever.

It's hard to even pick a favourite track. Existential Terror was clearly going to be mine from the outset, but I hadn't heard anything else at that point. As it went, Necromantic Fantasies made me wonder if I was being premature. Crawling King Chaos underlined that I was and The Dying of the Embers was the one that emphatically took over from it as my favourite, a delicious spoken word intro escalating even more deliciously into an old school heavy metal song that becomes extreme and playful and blistering in turn. It even ends as deliciously as it began. It's an absolute peach of a song.

If there's a flaw here, it's that the album runs long, over seventy minutes, and it doesn't sustain that level of imagination throughout. That's not to say that the second half is bad or poor or even just OK, especially with my favourite song to kick it off and a neat if brief instrumental interlude to follow. I'm rather partial to Suffer Our Dominion and Us, Dark, Invincible is growing on me, but, both on my first and subsequent listens, I find myself tuning out during some of the later tracks, something I never do during the first half.

This is still a major Cradle of Filth album though. It's the best I've heard from them in a long time and I can't remember when they were this vibrant and urgent and relishing in both of those things. I think I have to go with the first half as a 9/10 and the second as a still decent 7/10, so averaging out the album as a still highly recommended 8/10. If you're into extreme metal and don't care about staying within a particular subgenre boundary, this ought to be essential.

Monday, 16 August 2021

Belle Morte - Crime of Passion (2021)

It seems that Belle Morte isn't only the name of a symphonic gothic metal band from Minsk, it's also the stage name of its lead singer, who writes the lyrics and music too. Now, she certainly isn't the only musician here, because My Little Demon is a duet with a male voice, but I can't find anything to detail who else is here.

Metal Archives only lists Belle herself, but she's not alone in the band photo. Looking at the Belle Morte website, I find pictures of two people, five people and six people, along with a note that she's collaborated with the Norwegian melodic death metal band Addendum, which is a one man project. So, I have no idea who's on this, but I'm guessing that it's the lady known as Belle Morte and a gentleman called Priest who is also Addendum.

[Note: Belle kindly let me know that this started as a two piece studio project but is now a six piece band. As suggested, she's the vocalist and songwriter and the rest of the band is as follows: Ilya Rogovoy and Ilya Petrashkevich on guitars, Sergey Butovsky on bass and backing vocals (that's him on My Little Demon), Rostislav Golubnichiy on drums and Maria Shumanskaya on keyboards. Butovsky is also the producer. Thanks, Belle!]

From that rich cello and flute in the introductory piece, we know that this is going to be dramatic. Yes, it has a very similar sweeping refrain to Adele's theme for Skyfall, but it rolls neatly into the opening song proper, Who are You, which is at once heavy and delicate, that neat balancing act that's up there with my primary reasons for listening to gothic metal. It's a good opener and If Only You Knew isn't a bad follow up, a little more modern and a little more industrial, but To Get Her is easily the standout here and Belle clearly knows that because there's an acoustic version of it included at the end of the album.

Circumstances have led to me listening to this over and over for a couple of weeks, as I get other work done that's prevented me knocking album reviews out, and, every single time I enjoy this album just a little more, but To Get Her always stands out from everything else. Mostly it's the vocal line, but it's a peach of a track from an instrumental standpoint too. It's notable to me that it's just as effective in a bonus acoustic form, something that rarely happens. The piano and violin stand out nicely in this take and a male counterpart behind Belle's voice works too.

I should add that other songs do get close, especially in the middle of the album. I love how the music escalates at the beginning of Beauty and the Beast and that whole song has a wonderful flow to it. My Broken Things is an elegant dance of a track. It felt strange sitting still in a chair, because it felt like I was being whirled around a dancefloor at a gothic ball, a memorable experience given a few shifts in tempo. Beauty Meant to Kill plays out like a mediaeval folk song. Also, the closer, My Legacy, may well be the catchiest number here, just to take us home right.

I liked this on a first listen, but it didn't really pop for me until a second time through. Over two more weeks, it's improved a little more without becoming an undying favourite. However, I can't underline enough how rare it is for me to be able to listen to an album, any album, this much without it tiring on me at some point. This works as an album to dive into and actively explore, but it also works in passive mode, as background. That's another reason it took me so long to write this one up, because it turned into an old friend and it's always hard to stay objective at that point. Let's just say it's one of the good ones, whoever's playing on it.

Friday, 5 March 2021

Moonspell - Hermitage (2021)

Portugal's premier gothic metal band return with a new album, their twelfth, which returns them to a predominantly English language approach after their concept album, 1755, about the earthquake that year in Lisbon, which was entirely in Portuguese. As has increasingly become the case, this is a gothic metal album that isn't what we would usually think of when someone mentions gothic metal. There is no beauty and the beast vocal interaction and no female vocalist at all. In fact, there's not a heck of a lot of metal either.

While Moonspell reached this stage of their careers in a gradual shift away from the black metal they started out playing, this feels like it started instead as goth rock, moved into progressive rock and, at points, heavied up a little. The Greater Good, which opens the album, plays with that contrast, mostly staying in a rock vein but happy to get more crunchy and emphatic at points. However, a song like All or Nothing feels like it's still in that prog phase, the gothic tone mostly in the pleading of the vocals but overshadowed by some neat guitar solos. It doesn't even think about becoming metal, even when it could.

I quite like this sound, even if I was hoping for something heavier, but these songs aren't particularly immediate. I liked what I was hearing, even on a first time through, but it took a few listens to really start to appreciate what Moonspell are doing here and, even then, little of it wowed me. I just became increasingly comfortable with it until the point where some of the songs turned into old friends. The longer I listened to this album, the more I appreciated it, but it took time.

Entitlement was the first song to seep under my skin. It's a slower, proggier piece, but an atmospheric one too, that atmosphere being dark and obviously rooted in goth, if notably underplayed goth if we compare to what the early eighties would have done to it. It chooses to beckon us in rather than bash us over the head and drags us there, which helps to underline that it may be one part Bauhaus but it's one part Bauhaus to four or five of Pink Floyd, the name that I kept coming back to. That influence is a stronger one as the album runs on, especially in the solos of Ricardo Amorim, who has been paying a lot of attention to Dave Gilmour, though the band are never derivative.

What surprised me, given the album's title and song titles such as Common Prayers, Solitarian or The Hermit Saints, is the lack of a religious feel. Clearly this is themed, if not a concept album, and we're constantly hearing references in the lyrics. I was following the music a lot more than the words, but it ends up being impossible not to hear words like "saints", "pray" and "hermit" repeating everywhere. However, excepting some choral backing vocals, the first hints I found were in Apophthegmata, eight songs in, and even there, it's only at points, through a well placed church organ, and not integral.

By the way, that song title doesn't refer to the name of a demon, it presumably refers to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or the Apophthegmata Patrum, a set of stories that describe spiritual practices of 5th century Christian hermits in the deserts of Egypt. It doen't explore them specifically, but there is a common thread running through this album about leaving the world of things behind and going elsewhere to think and pray and regain some sense of who we are.

And talking of identity, it's interesting to see that Moonspell apparently still think of themselves as a gothic metal band. Their Bandcamp page still uses tags like black metal, dark metal, gothic metal and progressive metal. There's no black metal here at all and, while the other three still hold truth, this is much more of a rock album. Sure songs like Common Prayers, The Hermit Saints and the title track are willing to add some metal crunch and vocals that are more overt but, over time, that gradually seems like a holdover from the older Moonspell, who are inexorably moving away from it. I'm interested in seeing where Moonspell go from here.

Friday, 19 February 2021

Tribulation - Where the Gloom Becomes Sound (2021)

Country: Sweden
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia

Not to be confused with the earlier thrash metal Tribulation from Surahammar, Sweden who released their only album in 1991, this Tribulation are from Arvika, three hours west, and they started out in a death metal that's gradually shifted to a gothic flavoured heavy metal. This is their fifth album, with the shift happening on their third, The Children of the Night, in 2015 which features Irma Vep rather than the expected Dracula in the cover art, I believe.

I really like the opener, In Remembrance, which is a moody, broody gothic rock epic adorned with the accessible harsh vocal of bass player Johannes Andersson. It's weightier than it is heavy, if that makes sense, the weight coming not from guitar riffs but a lush gothic texture that pervades the album. It's not denim and leather, it's heavy velvet, regardless how harsh that vocal gets. That only doubles when a song like Leviathans shows up, with playful guitars dancing above everything else. The most gothic piece here is Lethe, a concerto for piano and creaking oak. It isn't remotely heavy but it has weight to it like a curse. There's as much influence here from the Damned as Black Sabbath, if not more.

Plenty of names come to mind though. When Dirge of a Dying Soul begins, I thought Rainbow, as it's a doomy take on a classical piece of music I'm sure that I ought to recognise, though it moves more to Candlemass territory as the intro becomes the song. That's the only song with "dirge" in its name but it's not the only dirge, Inanna showing up later on. And that sits in between the two most traditional metal tracks, Daughter of the Djinn and Funeral Pyre, the latter of which especially screams Mercyful Fate, even without any falsettos. These are up tempo and lively but still dark and mysterious.

Much of this is immediate, which surprised me. There's a lot of musical territory in between Dirge of a Dying Soul and Funeral Pyre and that applies whether we're talking specifically about this album with pieces like Lethe or generally. Tribulation trawl a lot in, but they stamp their own brand onto it well enough that it all seems natural. Candlemass, the Damned and Mercyful Fate is a tasty combination. I could suggest that In Remembrance could sit on a Tim Burton soundtrack, if only he'd stop pandering to the mainstream public and grow some balls. There's a lot here.

However, some of it wasn't as immediate for me. There are ten songs here and, if half resonated from a first listen, the other half didn't. Some of them gelled the second time through, especially Hour of the Wolf, but others, such as Leviathans, continued to elude me. Parts of it got through, maybe, but not the whole song. This may not sound like me but perhaps it tries to do too much. I can't connect with Elementals, either, even though it sounds good. It just fades away for me in between the powerful Daughter of the Djinn and the arresting Inanna, though Inanna itself isn't Dirge of a Dying Soul.

So I should listen to this more, I think. For now, it's a good album. I just wonder whether how much of a better one it'll be when I'm fully acclimatised to Where the Gloom Becomes Sound.

Monday, 24 February 2025

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