Miseration

Tragedy Has Spoken

Written by: MST on 04/12/2012 19:59:42

Before parting with Scar Symmetry, the renowned Swedish metal vocalist Christian Älvestam became engaged in various other musical projects. Miseration was one of these projects. Formed in 2006, the band released their debut album "Your Demons - Their Angels" in 2007, an album with a sound resembling that of Scar Symmetry and similar melodeath bands. With 2009's "The Mirroring Shadow", the band moved into regular death metal territory, and this year's "Tragedy Has Spoken" shows little deviation from the path that these Swedes have been treading before.

We're treated to death metal in the vein of Hypocrisy, Bloodbath and Inevitable End, with the latter of these bands sharing two members with Miseration. It's semi-technical at times, but overall it's pretty standard. The tempo varies between full-on blasting and mid-tempo sections in thrashier or more melodic sections. Speaking of melodic sections, this album sees the band flirt a little with the melodic death metal that they used to play, and most of the time this works quite well. But from where I'm standing, Miseration is not supposed to be Scar Symmetry v2.0 (look up Solution .45 if that's what you were hoping for), so when Älvestam breaks out into his characteristic clean vocals in the chorus of "On Wings Of Brimstone", I get confused as to what Miseration are actually trying to do here.

Luckily though, that is a one-time thing on the album. Miseration generally stick to the death metal template without adding much to it. And sometimes that works very well, like in the excellent, fast-paced track "Children Of The Flames" with its bombastic riffs and a short, but powerful and easily recognizable chorus. Other tracks worthy of mention are "Ghost Barrier" which shows that Miseration are more than capable of mixing sections of blasting drum and death metal riffs with those melodic elements I mentioned earlier, and "Disaster Cage" which isn't really that good a song, but it includes some interesting riffing at the very least. But that's it really. The rest of the album is mostly comprised of forgettable, run-of-the-mill death metal tracks that seem to be going nowhere.

Closing with "Waylayer", a 6-minute track that actually comes close to sounding somewhat "epic" in its compositions and reveals that Miseration have it in them to write a good, slow death metal tune, "Tragedy Has Spoken" definitely ends on a high note. But most of the album is pretty forgettable without being overly boring, and although there are definitely a couple of very good tracks to be found here, my general feeling is that the album is way too average. And with this being the band's third album in a row receiving mediocre reviews (not only from RF.net), things aren't looking too good for Miseration.

Download: Children Of The Flames, Ghost Barrier, Waylayer
For The Fans Of: Bloodbath, Hypocrisy, Inevitable End, Scar Symmetry
Facebook

Release date: 02.07.2012
Lifeforce Records

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

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.