A Sound of Thunder - Out of the Darkness
When I saw the cover of this album, I thought that it would be Goth Metal. It has that washed out color and the cursive script that so many Goth Metal bands use. A Sound of Thunder also has a female vocalist and song titles like “The Nightwitch” and “The Day I Die” on their album. Those are usually clues that you’re going to get tinkling harpsichords, frilly shirts and songs about running mascara. A Sound of Thunder does have Goth Metal elements in their music, but I wouldn’t call them a Goth Metal band, at least not strictly. Their sound veers from hard driving Rock & Roll (“Kill That Bitch”), to a dark and heavy Black Sabbath groove (“The Day I Die” and parts of “Murderous Horde”), to straight-out Goth Metal (“The Nightwitch,” “Calat Alhambra” and “This Too Shall Pass”). You never really know what you’re going to get from one song to the next. All of the tracks on Out of the Darkness are good, but there is a serious lack of consistency between them. When you go from a Goth Metal track with fantasy lyrics and atmospheric music like “The Nightwitch,” to a hard rocking ode to killing the “other woman” and dumping her body behind a Pizza Hut, like “Kill That Bitch,” it throws you for a loop. Out of the Darkness is a good collection of songs, but as an album, it’s a bit too disjointed for my taste. The different styles are not the problem. The problem is that the songs don’t flow well together. On their own, they all rock. Together, this sounds like a compilation album with no direction. Given how different some of these songs are from each other, a few of these tracks clearly don’t belong. “Kill That Bitch” is a great Rock anthem, but it sticks out like a faithful-to-the-original cover of The Cure’s “Pictures of You” on a Napalm Death album. The other, more Rock inspired tracks are less anomalous, but when compared to the Goth Metal style of the others, they also stick out. And then there’s the track order… With all of those styles jumbled together, any consistency you might have gotten is lost. If the more Rock oriented songs came first and things gradually became more Goth Metal inspired, you could see where A Sound of Thunder was going. Maybe I’m just being too much of a perfectionist, but I really thought that the track order and song selection needed work. Maybe their next album will do it for me, but Out of the Darkness shows a band that can write deadly songs, but still needs work putting things together to form a deadly album.
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