Hymns and Dirges / Cold Winter

Tumulus' music can be describe as death metal with atmosphere plus black metal production values, and a Viking element. Think early Amorphis meets later Bathory. There are parts with a female singer, which does little to offset the monotony of the cheap death grunts of the main vocalist. The songs are generally slow and meloncholy. The production is very subdued, and there may be a lot of atmosphere, but the music never rises to fill the gap. There is occasionally a feeling of epicness, but it never lasts long. The outro track is the only song that really caught my ear. A very dark soft outro with a wind instrument harmonizing the melody.

As far as Tumulus goes, if they had appropriate production values, and put a little more zest into their songs, they might have something.

Mock is really just another black metal band in the crowd. The only noticable attribute about them is a thick guitar tone that dominates the music. Here again, the songs are just too sluggish to feel properly aggressive. The exception to this being the last track, which starts off moderately fast, but the drums are very sloppy - which probably shows why there aren't many fast parts. With the thick, grainy guitar tone it almost sounds like doom metal at times. Listenable, but nothing special.

Knowing that there is a member here who went on to form Kampfar makes perfect sense. It's really like a poor man's Kampfar.

Even combined, the two bands cannot make this a worthy release. It's just lacking in too many areas.