Carach Angren - Where the Corpses Sink Forever
This is the third full-length album from Carach Angren, the follow-up to 2010’s Death Came Through a Phantom Ship (however, there were three EPs between this album and the last). Though this band is described as Black Metal, there is very little that is Satanic about them. The lyrical focus of this album and most of their previous output has been more horror based. Their lyrics are like reading a book of old ghost stories (or maybe reading the lyrics to an old King Diamond album, which is kind of the same thing). Musically, this is very much comparable to listening to Cradle of Filth, but without Dani Filth’s high pitched wailing. The Gothic atmosphere is very strong throughout these nine songs. The best way to describe this would be to call it a dramatic reading with musical accompaniment. I’ll give Carach Angren credit for surprising me. When I saw the cover art, I was expecting this to be a clone of Cradle of Filth with a lot of whiny Goth lyrics. Though they do sound a lot like CoF, they have all of the good qualities and very little of the parts that most people detest. If there is one flaw in their product, it is in the vocal delivery. As a dramatic reading, this works. The vocalist’s style is brutal but understandable. You can follow along with most of the action even if you don’t have a lyric sheet or access to the internet. But the vocals don’t flow as well as they should with the songs. There isn’t any melody or attempts at “singing.” This is a relatively minor flaw, though. If you bother to listen to the vocals, you almost automatically start thinking of this as a dramatic reading because you can tell that there is a story in there. For a jaded Metalhead like me, finding something like this makes being a music critic worthwhile. Even though 80% of the stuff in my review queue is absolute crap, the hidden gems are worth their weight in gold. Where the Corpses Sink Forever is one of those gems. It isn’t flawless, but it’s pretty damn close.
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