Oniriad

I'm not going to waste much time on this. "Oniriad" is a terrible (and I do mean TERRIBLE) goth rock album by Darzamat, a band who was apparently a black metal band at one incredibly brief point in their career. "Oniriad" is not that point- not by a long shot. "Oniriad" is the sort of feeble goth rock you'd expect to find on "Karmacode" or a random later Moonspell record, minus the production values and at least marginally acceptable songwriting. "Oniriad," unlike those albums, is not merely shitty and boring but borderline unlistenable for a multitude of reasons. It sounds cheap, lame, forced, and pathetic enough that it's amazing the band actually wrote and performed this music with a straight face. It's even more amazing that fucking Wounded Love, the sublabel of Avantgarde responsible for releasing artists like Taake, actually decided to fund this album. What the hell was ANYONE involved in the production of this abortion thinking?

This hits every direction of bad goth at the same time: you have weepy Victorian symphonic parts, goofy electronic-laced cyber parts, and plenty of straightforward, awful goth rock in the Moonspell vein. The songs are boring and go nowhere, but beyond that, each individual element is awful in its own way. The vocals are so powerless they might as well be spoken word; the female vocals are bland but acceptable, but the male vocals are absurdly feeble, warbling on and off key like midget standing on a stepstool. The riffs are nonexistent, mostly sticking to rote chugging and praying that the synths and other electronic effects will pick up the slack. Unsurprisingly, they don't; the synths play exactly the same chord structures you've heard in every other goth rock band connected in some way to the metal scene where the more cyber-style electronic effects just tend to clutter the background of the music without actually doing anything of their own. Lowlights? There's a few; "Beauty" is particularly inexcusable, sounding like the soundtrack to a commercial for a cheap perfume line repped by Carmen Electra with its tremolo-effected guitars and easy-listening bass, but "Time" is really bad too since it sounds like it's going for a power metal feel but somehow manages to arrive at miserable goth rock instead. Who cares, they're all terrible.

There is nothing good about this. Nothing. I can unequivocally say that I have fundamentally wasted a part of my life by listening to this. "Oniriad" is a terrible album and Darzamat are terrible people for making it.

I came across this album a few days ago and I must say that it's one of the worst gothic albums I've came across.

The lyrics are very poor. They carry out the same easy gothic topics over and over again already used throughout the years. Not original at all. And I even dare to say some are very badly written.
The musical composition isn't very elaborate either. Keyboards seems to have only a few chords and do not add anything new to the sounds they attempt to create. Guitars follow the same patterns you have heard in other thouands of groups; the less original guitars I have heard in many years.
For all but one song, the bass guitar can not be heard, as if it didn't exist.
But the worst part goes for the vocals. The male vocals are not only poor, but seem out of tune in many parts and sings all songs exactly in the same way. All ends of phrases sound the same, as if all album were one song. Female vocals aren't much better. The female vocals are just limited to some wailing between pauses of male vocals, repeating the same lyrics of male vocals and not very good at all. Not to mention the operatic attempts of her on the song "Elegy". Vibrato is just pathetic, falsetto is just unbearable. Never two voices sounded so bad together.

All elements put together, along with something that are supposed to be orchestral arrengements, come to be a totally predictable album, which does not create any atmosphera at all and does certainly not invite to a second hearing. Not worth listening to.