Shadows Embrace the Dark

So what happens when a music scene is overloaded?  What happens when the next best thing explodes and people from all over just can't get enough?  We get something like this.  Twilight Ophera was a melodic black metal act from Finland (those last six word should be enough to raise many people's hackles...) taking their stab at a genre already becoming watered down when they hit the scene; by 1997 the mystique was quickly fading, the heavy hitters were ending their jail stints and becoming more grounded folks, and the next group of kids weren't old enough to use safety lighters, thereby stalling the church fires, but regardless they had music to write, stories to tell, and a voice to be heard.  Sorta.

I'd be lying if I said the cover art of this here debut didn't at least poke at my attention (I mean...hm.), and many years would transcend before I was able to finally give it a swing...

I'd once joked that the material provided in "Shadows Embrace the Dark" sounds like something I would have written in high school during my rather engrossing "vampire metal" phase where I was wholly drawn into this kind of overblown, fang-and-claw-drenched melodrama, and I'll still hold to that (it really does sound like that to me!), but maybe that's why I ended up taking this with a rather wide berth and found plenty to enjoy in the end.  The site calls this band, and approach, "melodic black metal", but that's not really a proper description.  Some of the atmosphere of black metal is present, but the whole of "Shadows..." has a far more Gothic vibe mixed with your bog standard Finnish power/melodic death metal riffing and leads that we've all heard a thousand times before (yet to be fair, at this point this sort of style wasn't nearly as over-saturated as it would become a few years down the line; thank you, Bodom and crew!), loaded with plenty of delicious keyboards and dry, almost inconsequential death growls that fit about as well as a left handed glove on your face.

As per usual with this style, the keyboards are the main attraction and, thankfully, Timo Peranen is quite the ivory tickler, crafting passages and lines that add much more depth and meat to the rather uninspired riffing and chord schemes and provide a good, strong "circus of horrors" aesthetic, reminding me quite a bit of Grimloch's turn in Tartaros only much less idiotic (if you can believe it).  The rest of the band, though?  Well...they're there.  I guess.  Guitars mainly chug and tremolo pick alongside the massive payload of keys, augmenting but only breaking out into their own thing on seldom occasion.  The bass exists (sorta), and the drummer has that triplet, 6/8 beat and tempo ice cold, making up a good 60% of the album's rhythm at least.  The aforementioned growler has energy to spare in spite of a limited range and repertoire, save the moment where he attempts a deep, Gothicky narrative voice that borders on gut-wrenching (the "narration" in "Shadowdancer" redefines the term "wallpaper"), and the female singing (because of course female singing!) is, at least, clean and fits with everything just fine.

All of which sounds like a recipe for self-flagellation for the more churlishly serious crypt-dwellers in the black metal spectrum, and yet, dammit if these guys didn't sound like they were having a whale of a time churning all this out!  There's so much energy, so much whimsy, to the songs presented that you just can't help but admire.  Yes, it's hacky, its corny, it's got an atmosphere more on par with "Tales from the Crypt" versus good and proper horror, but it's all just...fun in the end.  It's ridiculousness for the sake of it, which I can very much appreciate.  I just wish it had more to offer; from "Shadowdancer" onward, it all starts to blend together, retreading old territory (noticeably at that!) and not offering anything else we haven't heard before from them, even others (e.g. the Dimmu Borgir aping past the halfway point in "Opera 666" left a very sour taste).  Same tempos, same huge keys, same chunky riffs and gurgles...it almost felt like it was padded out in the last third of the record just for the sake of it.  Everything was said in the glorious first few tracks, only to slowly die out.  Bogus, that.

All in all Twilight Ophera's debut, while feeling more like a collection of ideas rather than a cohesive final work, was fun where it counted, if tiresome and out of gas near the end and was about as effective on the scene as yet one more pentagram necklace on the mountain before it.  Good for a nice blast to the past, where I stalked the high school corridors like the proud try-hard Vlad Dracul I wished to be, but that's about it.