doom / post-metal
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I've been listening to this album a few times today, trying to come up with an opening paragraph for this review. These are often the hardest things to write. So I could talk about the weather, which is warm and wet today. Or I could talk about the immense variety of the doom metal genre and where exactly this band fits in. But most of all, I think it's best to describe what I've been doing while I was listening to this e.p. Apart from some chars, I've been constantly nodding my head in approval of this music.
Abandoned Dreams hail from Munich, Germany and have been writing music since 2009, first as a trio, than as a quartet and since 2013 as a trio again. Throughout the years, the music slightly changed, mainly noticable in the clean vocals over the atmospheric and bleak sounding music. There are some blackened grunts presents as well, adding and extra sense of bleakness and despair to the already melancholic doom metal. This combination makes up for something very promising.
The e.p. opens with title track 'Home', which is quite an interesting piece of doom rock and seems to borrow some influences from post-rock and black metal. The result is amazing, something between Agalloch, Woods of Ypres and Russian Circles. As I mentioned before, the clean vocals fit perfectly here and so do the screams of desperation at the end.
'Keep The Lights Burning' drives on similar elements as the previous song, namely a mid-tempo, simple but effective guitars and very strong clean vocals. So in a way the song is quite the same but that doesn't matter one bit because it's simply great stuff to listen to, time and time again. In the middle of the song a huge instrumental post-rock passage shows what Abandoned Dreams are capable of, creating a highly atmosphere song with a quite minimal approach.
Closer 'Embrace' brings more atmospheric doom metal goodness, this time with some black metal riffs thrown into the mix. It's a fantastic finale for a great e.p. and it certainly makes me curious about what this band can do on stage. In other words, I'd really like to see them play live because that's where this kind of music is written for. I'm sure they will gain many followers if they can make up a stunning live performance with this material. So yes, I can see this band growing to the upper regions of today's doom scene, that's for sure.
Serge
Abandoned Dreams hail from Munich, Germany and have been writing music since 2009, first as a trio, than as a quartet and since 2013 as a trio again. Throughout the years, the music slightly changed, mainly noticable in the clean vocals over the atmospheric and bleak sounding music. There are some blackened grunts presents as well, adding and extra sense of bleakness and despair to the already melancholic doom metal. This combination makes up for something very promising.
The e.p. opens with title track 'Home', which is quite an interesting piece of doom rock and seems to borrow some influences from post-rock and black metal. The result is amazing, something between Agalloch, Woods of Ypres and Russian Circles. As I mentioned before, the clean vocals fit perfectly here and so do the screams of desperation at the end.
'Keep The Lights Burning' drives on similar elements as the previous song, namely a mid-tempo, simple but effective guitars and very strong clean vocals. So in a way the song is quite the same but that doesn't matter one bit because it's simply great stuff to listen to, time and time again. In the middle of the song a huge instrumental post-rock passage shows what Abandoned Dreams are capable of, creating a highly atmosphere song with a quite minimal approach.
Closer 'Embrace' brings more atmospheric doom metal goodness, this time with some black metal riffs thrown into the mix. It's a fantastic finale for a great e.p. and it certainly makes me curious about what this band can do on stage. In other words, I'd really like to see them play live because that's where this kind of music is written for. I'm sure they will gain many followers if they can make up a stunning live performance with this material. So yes, I can see this band growing to the upper regions of today's doom scene, that's for sure.
Serge