Quoth the Raven Nevermore

This is pretty interesting, an album based on the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, in particular his most famous poem 'The Raven'. It's very melodic with piano carrying the melody, and pretty epic, creating quite a nice atmosphere, fairly gothic albeit pretty noticably upbeat.

One problem though, is that it's quite inconsistant. The first half is near enough power metal with growled vocals, and doesn't have much of a death metal vibe at all, opting for a more melodic, traditional sound. It's pretty epic, and where most of the quality lies. It's a tad over melodic, with the piano at the forefront carrying most of the melody, but it's pretty nice music and enjoyable to listen to.

However, things speed up quite radically by about halfway through ('Annabel Lee' onwards), as if the band suddenly decided to attempt more of an extreme style. I believe that the earlier tracks (or at least most of them) feature a live drummer, or at least a convincing drum machine due to it's mid-paced speed. However, as we pass the halfway point we get some very fake sounding drum machine blasting which don't necessarily last the whole track but play a significant part of it. Unfortunately it doesn't stop there, and the blasting continues to be prominent up until the last track, which spoils those songs for me. The penultimate song 'Those Were the Days' brings it all back though, by way of an out of place yet nevertheless really cool folk metal jig-a-long.

This album's pretty inconsistant but the majority of the tracks are good, and if you like melodic death metal bands like Crematory you might wanna check this out.