Frozen

Frozen has plenty of elements from different styles, it sounds like the perfect mix of Doom Metal, Dark Ambient, and Electro-Dark Music; which is the reason why most of Crowhead’s fans are into Alternative Goth-Rock/Metal. Because of that, I wouldnt recommend this album to people who are only into extreme metal, but to the ones that enjoy depressive music and are open minded about electronic orientated metal, specially because of the 3 remixes in the album.

The depressed lyrics and the voice used in Frozen, have made some reviewers label the band as “the metal version of The Cure”, and also Crowhead is compared to mid-period Katatonia because of the doom metal guitar riffs and the clean depressed singing. Despite all that, I would like to say that Crowhead also has differences to those bands, just as a start, Crowhead clearly shows that they are influenced by electro-dark ambient music and are more synth orientated than Katatonia.

All songs in Frozen are good, the only rare detail are the verses in “Fire Eye”, singer Jo trying to growl didn’t sound as good as it should, but fortunately there’s the catchy chorus that saves the day. That’s pretty much what the album is all about, the chorus of each song, are all catchy, melodic and depressive. If you want depressive synth music with a good distorted guitar?, This is it.

The two songs that have more recognition are “My Angel” and “Mad man”, without doubt are the best songs of the album. “My Angel” starts with a good distorted guitar and has plenty of standard palm muted riffing, which is very common in goth metal bands like Entwine and To Die For, with the exception that Crowhead’s doom metal timing makes the music sound slower and more atmospheric.

“Mad man” starts with a clean guitar riff using effects of reverb and delay to give an atmospheric touch, and the song stays like that during the verse until the distorted guitar enters for the catchy chorus. This song has plenty of melodic clean guitars with lots of echo and delay, making it sound very depressive. As you can see, the talent of these guys is not in how complicated is their music to play, is not about the technique either, is about how depressed and beautiful the music sounds.

Just to conclude, I know that I mentioned some electro-dark ambient sounds in the album, but there are some remixes here that are clearly electro/industrial, and I would like to make the remark that Sebastian Komor (Icon of Coil) remixed 2 songs. (The Soul is in the Dark Side 1 and 2)