Dinner Auf Uranos

50 Sommer - 50 Winter

Written by: PP on 17/08/2010 15:44:01

Hee hee hee oh that is so funny. I get it, Dinner Auf Uranos = dinner on your ass when pronounced in English. That's so fucking stupid. Luckily the band's music isn't as terrible as their name seems to suggest, although I'm guessing most people reading this mag will be turned off by their darkened ambiance that leans a little too much in gothic territory for my liking. "Dark rock", is what I've seen other similar bands and reviews call music like that found on "50 Sommer - 50 Winter", dark, melancholic and slightly progressive stuff. It feels like the focus is on creating dark ambiance similar to that of HIM and The 69 Eyes, but without the heartagram imagery and the pop overlay, and instead with more of a progressive undertone slapped on for good measure.

The album seems to be divided into two themes, with three songs representing sounds of summer, and three songs representing winter. The former side is slightly more lively when it comes to melody and guitars in comparison to the winter side, supposedly depicting how the world is full of life. If that is indeed the point, then they should've taken it a few steps further, because the dark rock sound overshadows the point of the summer so much that I'm feeling more like rainy October in Denmark rather than birds singing, trees are green imagery associated with, say, June. If not, well, don't blame me since the lyrics are all in German, and in that case, it's merely decent dark rock with no surprises included.

"Frost 1" opens the second half of the album with a short singer/songwriter acoustic guitar passage. Again, I'm not feeling the winter thing as much as I would've hoped from a record with a title that suggests 50/50 division like that. Anyway, it functions as some sort of an interlude to a mammoth, TWENTY FUCKING TWO MINUTE song that could've (should've) been cut down to just half the length if all the unnecessary progression would've been removed and replaced with a focus on the essentials. It's here that Dinner Auf Uranos are at their most metallic. Raw distortion sneaks into the mix every now and then for relatively more chaotic sections compared to other stuff on the album. I suppose if I had more patience (who has time to listen to a 22 minute song in 2010? Seriously, who?), I could find that the extremely progressive arrangement of the song leads into something great, but considering the other stuff on the disc has utterly failed to grab my interest, I doubt that another 22 minutes of the same with more progression will do the trick either. Am I being too harsh? Maybe, but the truth is that "50 Sommer - 50 Winter" is very much a niché record. It'll appeal to people who like dark, ambient music and nobody else. For the rest of the musical spectrum, it'll simply feel too minimalistic and too dark to enjoy. It's better than, say, these guys or this darkwave band, but not by a lot.

4

Download: 6786
For the fans of: Myhybris, dark rock, darkwave
Listen: Myspace

Release date 14.05.2010
Cold Dimensions / Grau

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