Mortemia

Misere Mortem

Written by: PK on 14/04/2010 22:55:17

OK people, so I have been away from Rockfreaks for a little while which means I have a fair few reviews piling up and I am raring to go. First to finally get an airing is "Misere Mortem", the latest album from Norwegian gothic metal band Mortemia. They are a band who buck the apparent trend in the genre to have a female vocalist at the helm, which at least makes this in theory a slightly more interesting album to review owing to its deviation from the gothic norm. And before you get too excited at this prospect, just take a moment to compose yourself before I explain to you how awful "Misere Mortem" is.

So let's start with something positive at least. There are a few decent riffs to be found on the album, particularly in the track "The Candle At The Tunnel's End". For about thirty seconds you stopped and almost forget that you were listening to what is essentially a rubbish album. I listened to "Misere Mortem" a number of times and at no point did any of it linger in my mind in the slightest. Every song sounded exactly the same, and the album just rolled into one long gothic durge. If you needed evidence of this monotony without even hearing any songs, just look at the track titles - evey single one starts with the word "The". At one point I had to actually check that I hadn't put a single track on repeat by accident because I couldn't distinguish between that song and the one that had preceded it. As well as this, for some reason the band felt the need for every single track to have a choir featured in the chorus. They sang what sounded like the same four lines each time, backed by exactly the same chord sequence as the track before. After the first song, "The One I Once Was" I'd had enough of it, so by the last track I was in tears. And don't even ask me to quote any lyrics from the album - God knows what they were meant to be. From choral to guttural vocal passages, I was stumped as to what was being said .

Maybe I am being harsh, I don't know. Gothic metal doesn't exactly float my boat, but I would like to think that I am open-minded enough to recognise an especially good or bad album in any sub-genre of rock and metal given the chance to hear it. I suspect that it is purely a case of "Misere Mortem" just not being a very good album at all. If this one makes my top ten albums at the end of the year then it will have been a very dismal twelve months indeed in the metal world.

4

Download: The One I Once Was, The Candle At The Tunnel's End
For The Fans Of: Sirenia, Elis, Elysion
Listen: myspace.com/mortemiano

Release Date 26.02.2010
Napalm Records

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.