Darkness Remains "Lamia" CD
[Tribunal]
I guess they abandoned the whole double CD idea, and honestly, if everything would've sounded like this, it's just as well. Because, while not bad, this is not at all what I would call a progression for Darkness Remains. While flawed, their last record was a very surprising offering of technical death metal with tons of Death inspired riffing and a good sense of melody and feeling. I was expecting them to hone their writing skills and head in a slightly more progressive direction. That's not the case at all. The performance here is certainly tight, however this material is far more simple and standard in my opinion. It's not necessarily boring, but it definitely drags on and doesn't grip me very much. They start out with a really lame, "dark" synth intro that drags on for nearly three minutes and serves no real purpose other than to irritate me and make me ask myself, "When are they going to break out the metal?" Then "Lamia in Corinth", the first real song, finally kicks in with some moderately paced riffing and subtle dissonance before jumping into some faster tempos and snarling vocals that's all reminiscent of modern black metal, later dropping some slower rhythms that are in more of a traditional early 90's death metal vein as the vocals also follow suit and venture into lower growling territory. "Serenity's Desire" is a paradox of a track, combining the best and the worst elements of this album into one 13+ minute mess. At times it's boring as shit, yet they also drop an excellent acoustic break alongside some fucking killer singing vocals; a few minutes later they start to get into some slightly faster melodic riffing, great basslines, and drumming flare; towards the end there is another excellent clean break with a great bass presence and far more emotional atmosphere than anything else present on this CD; etc. All of these elements are precisely what they need to be incorporating more of into their work, but they also need to bring back the complex edge that they had before, because this material just sounds so easy and weak by comparison in most areas. I mean, what's with all the stale pinch harmonics and relatively mild tempos? Why are the songs ridiculously long (several nearing or well over 10 minutes) and completely disjointed with no sense of fluidity whatsoever? What makes this so different from any other death/black metal band out there? Sure, there are some technical runs and a few nice solos (though some of the leads are pretty awful), and yeah, there's some originality here... but compared to their last record this is a huge step backwards as far as the general approach is concerned. The writing qualities have just sort of stagnated. The last two songs, "Aura of Despair" and "Plagues Not Overcome", are by far the best tracks on the record as they're the most consistent in their integration of changes and diverse influences, the most mildly technical, and the most memorable... If they were to go in these directions at all times they could redeem themselves. I do like the recording for the most part. It sounds a lot better than the last record. The guitars are thick and well controlled, the drums are dense with good kick and not too much rigidity, the bass tone is solid, and the vocals don't bother me. My main complaint is that they need to crank the bass way the fuck up in the center of the mix and perhaps add more definition to it, because the bass performance seems to be the most interesting thing going on here - it's just too hard to make out most of the time. I might also drop the vocals back ever so slightly. That's about it, though. It sounds strong, for sure. However, I really don't like the layout at all. I like the font used for the band logo, and I like that the colors are consistent, but I'm not sure what the imagery has to do with anything (repeating layers of some sort of ridged tubing or something), and it looks very plain. The inner spread is very bland, using black text over a white background with a few light gray images of the tubes again. I don't know. It's not visually engaging at all. Lyrically things are personal and not all that interesting to me, as they seem more like derivative emo lyrics than anything truly introspective. "If I could reach the horizon I would tear it down, So I could see the stars forever, The cold rain is my sadness, And the tears that fall never-ending into my open hands, Asking me questions I could never answer..." Fuck. I don't know. I'm let down. Their last record was a wildly promising debut, and this is just... bland. I don't understand why they decided to go in this direction. I don't see the inspiration. There are still promising moments here that tell me that this band could do amazing things, but as a whole this record is a regression, if anything. I'm stunned, I had really huge expectations for this one... those last two tracks are really good, but not good enough to make up for the first 30 minutes of tedium. (6/10)
Running time - 52:47, Tracks: 7
[Notable tracks: Aura of Despair, Plagues Not Overcome]
Tribunal Records - http://www.tribunalrecords.com

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