Crematory’s eerie and atmospheric masterpiece! – 85%
kluseba, October 6th, 2010
To me, this album is one of the best ones that Crematory had ever done in their career. It has dark vibes, a really eerie atmosphere, a very unique mood, many songs touching different styles and almost just one catchy song after the other.
The listener gets into this eerie atmosphere with the nervously flickering vibes of the opener “When darkness falls” who works with contrasts like light and darkness or tranquility and loudness. Whispering voices and floating winds open the song before a strong chorus shows us one of the main forces of this album: The mixture of soft vocals by the guitar player Matthias Hechler and the growls of main singer Gerhard Stass. Each of them represents desperately hope and the other one despair on this album.
The dreamy and hypnotic “Sleeping solution” goes into the same mood, as well as the very eerie and innovative “Just words” in which you hear strange voices, screaming people and a very dark keyboard and generally a disturbing and reduced orchestration of the instruments. Especially this song grows a lot with the time. On the other hand, you have also faster, almost thrash-orientated songs like “Burning bridges” who remind of the older stuff of this band, not just rooted in the gothic scene, but as well in the death metal scene.
Even hit songs, if we can call them like that on such an album, like the more metal orientated and straight title song “Pray” and the amazing “Left the ground” which is dominated by its keyboard melodies and a very simple but strong chorus showing influences from industrial metal or the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, fit perfectly in the mood of the album. Throughout the whole record this atmosphere is continuingly present and that is what makes this record so special.
Every song goes hand in hand with the others even though this album has a quiet good variety of style. It’s maybe the only time in the whole band’s career that there is such a concentrated atmosphere and not a single song escaping from that and destroying the efforts of the previous ones. This album works a whole one and – a part of the hit song “Left the ground” – you couldn’t just pick one song and listen to it, you must listen to the album as a whole and get drowned into its very dark mood.
“When darkness falls” slowly drowns you in a very dark atmosphere and the dark ballad “Say goodbye” leaves you on a very hypnotic and melancholic note with its haunting ending. Between those this beginning and end, you have almost fifty minutes of great music. This is definitely a record for dark and cold autumn or winter nights. It is a brilliant album for fans of haunting and dark gothic and even doom influenced music. This is good stuff for open minded people who don’t mind if a keyboard dominates most of the record if it is well employed.
rafazardly 