The Dark Flower

Heavy Metal has been known to produce things both beautiful and destructive, both life-affirming and just really damn cool.

I'm just saying that to remind myself that it's true, after hearing something this awful. With that said, let's dig into the spectacle of fantastically worthless garbage that is Cydonia's The Dark Flower, an album so terrible and wrong that it has been known to kill newborn infants in its proximity even without being put into any nearby CD player. An album so devoid of talent that it might as well just not exist at all. And I honestly have to wonder about that; I'm not sure this album is really supposed to exist. It is just too shitty, and it sounds kind of like something a band like Evergrey would produce if they were falling-down drunk. I cannot fathom any sentient, functioning human being finding enjoyment in music that is this directionless, fumbling and incompetent, this lacking in any semblance of actual songwriting at all. So, to keep myself sane, I have concluded that The Dark Flowers was not supposed to exist, or at least, not supposed to be released. No, this was just something the band members happened to produce by accidentally pushing all of their instruments down a wishing well while the singer recited verses from ABBA's Greatest Hits and turned them into the choruses on this album. That sounds much more plausible than the concept of five normal human beings walking into a recording studio and making this on purpose.

No, of course I know that is actually true, but that's the kind of delusion this music has driven me to. Cydonia's sound is really hard to describe, being sort of an amalgamation of things that just don't make any sense together, and this isn't even as entertainingly painful as something like Unexpect, either. The clean vocals don't fit with the chugging, gruelingly constructed riffs (which don't sound like the band had any fun making them), which definitely don't fit with the weak guitar tone, which doesn't fit with the sometimes disjointed and progressive songwriting style. The songs don't seem to exist for any other purpose than reaching the chorus, which is a sure-fire sign of laziness and boredom, and also extreme ineptitude. Nothing here sounds right! It's all just so dirty and unappealing, and it just makes you feel like you need to take a shower after it stops playing. Yeah, it's one of those albums.

The riffs are probably the worst, sounding a lot of the time like the band just recorded their guitarists farting and then added distortion to it. The choruses are terrible themselves; constructed well enough, but really lacking any kind of energy or power to them, and the fact that all the songs are pretty much based around them makes it even sadder. The songwriting on here is definitely some of the worst I've heard in ages, shambling, incoherent, annoying and most of all, unmemorable. How? How can anyone derive enjoyment from this? I don't even think the band did, for that matter; this was just some kind of terrible joke. Maybe their parents never loved them or something, I don't know.

This whole album is just filled with unpleasant moment after unpleasant moment, with little being of any worth. Seriously, if all an album has is catchy choruses, it obviously is doing something terribly wrong. "Midnight Man" and the title track don't completely suck, with more restrained structures, but those are the only two slight bright spots here, and even those aren't very good or inspiring. The rest of this is just wretched all around: "Visions" has its annoying pinch harmonics, and then "One Last Crime," with its mother-of-all-that-is-unholy chugging riffs and psuedo-Thrash angry shouting on the verses, doesn't sound right at all when the clean, catchy radio pop chorus hits you. "Invisible" is a hideous song with some of the worst Power Metal chords I've ever heard, sounding incredibly random and incoherent when blended in with that Pantera-Meets-Evergrey impression these guys keep doing.

"Beyond Time" and "Another Age" both suck, and "Master Shadow" does, too...okay, it's clear the band just gave up here. They didn't have any more material, so they just decided to start aimlessly recording whatever the fuck they could think of right on the spot. The choruses, which were previously so well crafted and shamelessly pop-oriented, are now just background noise, like the rest of the album. In fact, that is what is wrong with this album; nothing jumps out at you or really tries to capture your attention, it's all just this huge, uninspiring jumble of festering, watered down puke that anyone with taste can stay away from. In fact, you can not only stay away from it, you should just drop everything and start running in the opposite direction. Fuck this dilapidated chunk of musical diarrhea.

Originally written for http://www.metalcrypt.com

The moment you first listen to The Dark Flower you really don't know what is going. The first initial ...And Oceans feeling is soon replaced by Dream Theater, later to be replaced by Nevermore and Annihilator, only to turn into any common Italian Power Metal band, then raped into something off a hard-core or nu-metal release.

But for some reason, this strange mixture of genres, this bastardisation of more than 6 genres, for some obscene reason unknown to me DOES feel original. When you top it with a vocalist of extreme talent, and the rest of the line-up kicking in every department, you do start to feel like you might have some an ace in your hands... or in your CD player.

In fact it does get a little time getting used to. Changing from Arachnes to Dream Theater to Nevermore, sometimes the songs will feel strange. But once you get the hang of things, get initiated if I must describe it this way, a brave new world is opened before your eyes.

I believe that Cydonia are doing something with no reference to it. Because it is another thing to simply copy a riff from there, implement a keyboard from elsewhere and claim it your own: Cydonia feel original and fresh no matter the sounds and genres they combine.

So far though, I have not given an excuse for the great score. Thing is, all the songs in the album are amazing. And when I say amazing is that as soon as one is over, the next takes the task of continuing to rock and move you, which is something that rarely ever happens in bands that attempt something new. Plainly put, it is one thing to write a single original song, or have a good original idea, but a completely different thing to be able to create an amazing song after an amazing song, and make each second in them be worth it.

I can see why some people won't like this, and sometimes those Slipknot and System Of A Down references are too obvious to omit, but once you see how amazingly they can pull it off, and make them fade into something off ...And Oceans, or Nevermore, or even Penumbra and Kovenant, you will soon understand that these boys not only have talents, but they know how to use them.

An amazing album, from a band that I expect more next time around. I know they can. I just hope that they did not raise the bar too high for their own good.