Soulfallen - The Promise of Hell
I salivated at the opportunity to review this third album from Finland’s Soulfallen, as 2007’s World Expiration and 2009’s Grave New World were two remarkably solid albums to start a career with that went virtually unnoticed. Quite a shame, really. The band’s symphonic take on Doomy Melodeath may not be the most unique or original item on the menu, but a large portion of their material proved to be heartily memorable after repeated listening. But of course this is my luck we’re talking about, so it’s no surprise that The Promise of Hell significantly lacks it predecessors’ mournful glory and catchiness. Album opener, “The Birth of Newfound Death,” gets things off to a great start, combining headbangability and gloom in epic fashion. However, just as it seems they’ve picked up right where they’d left off, the album slips into a coma. Not a second’s worth of music is remembered beyond the first song, even after months of searching for anything even slightly resembling appeal. It’s not as though they’ve gone and written the worst album ever made —they haven’t wimped out, or drastically changed style, or embarrassed themselves with a myriad of genre cliches— they simply wrote one terrific song and phoned in the rest of the record. Whether at Death/Thrash speed or a Doom crawl, the riffs go nowhere, the synths are on auto-pilot, and the melodies don’t come close to hurting enough. “At the Heart of Dying” attempts to close things out on a heartfelt note with it’s swaying depressive dirges, but it’s far too little, far too late. A dreadfully mediocre statement from a band already mired in obscurity.
(0) Comment(s)
Page 1 of 1 pages