Desire of Damnation

First of all, there’s a thing I have to clear: I LOVE Theatres des Vampires. They are among my favourite bands, I love all their albums, of course mostly the albums with Lord Vampyr, but ’Pleasure And Pain’ and ’Anima Noir’ were also great albums, eventhough they aren’t fit to TDV’s past.
I’ve always known that without Lord Vampyr they will never be as good as the used to be, but what they do on this cd (and on ’The Addiction Tour’ DVD) is terrible.

The most horrible thing is that they can’t play their own songs live, mainly because of two things:
The first is the lack of vocalists. They did not look for a new singer to replace Lord Vampyr, so the only singer in the band is now Sonya Scarlet, who has a good voice, but Theatres des Vampires classics like ’Dances With Satan’, ’La Danse Macabre Du Vampire’, ’Lilith Mater Inferorum’, ’Queen of the Damned’ sound awful with only female vocals instead of harsh vocals and male clean vocals. It just does’t work...
Also there are some songs that includes a choir (like ’Angel of Lust’) and I think it’s useless to say, the aren’t live but ’playback’. They used samples.

The second thing are the guitars. TDV’s music needs two guitarists, and since both Roberto Cufaro and Alessandro Pallotta left the band the remaining members thought they need only one guitarist... This concert absolutely proved this can’t work when it comes to live concerts.

The only thing that saves this record is the second disc. The remixed songs are not special, but interesting and good to hear sometimes, and the four new songs are quite enjoyable, however I’d expect songs like this from a band like Evanescence, not from Theatres des Vampires. This is not the logical evolution of their music, they should have continued under a different name. This is not Theatres des Vampires anymore whithout Lord Vampyr.

I hope one day they’ll realize this can’t go on, and find a vocalist that can actually sing the band’s songs, and if it happens, maybe the band can make enjoyable concerts again. Until that day Theatres des Vampires is dead to me, this is another band that likes to play TDV covers.