The Mad Cartridge

It was excruciating enough having to listen to this a few times so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on writing about it. Ethereal Travel is a band from Turkey who specializes in making terrible, warbling goth rock that's defined by the presence of a perpetually keening violin, a basically incompetent female vocalist, and a weird, permeating influence from '70s rock. It's not particularly metal, or at least not in the way you'd think- a lot of the metal is really coming from Black Sabbath or other '70s stalwarts than the more contemporary influences of bands like Moonspell. That's not to say this goes anywhere towards making this album listenable- not by a long shot. It just makes it a more interesting sort of bad.

The violin is loud and constant and rarely interesting- it does exactly what you would expect a violin to in a goth rock song and displays exactly the expected lack of nuance. Most of the violin melodies simply follow the guitars are play very, very simple, very predictable melodies as a counterpoint. The riffs are nothing; they're just three chord rock arrangements for the most part with a perplexing hint of Black Sabbath at certain moments, which, as you would expect, clashes horribly with the vocals and weepy violin. The vocalist is probably the most embarrassing part of this: she's regularly wavering on and off key throughout the songs and even at her best sounds weak and unimpressive. The production's dry as hell, the songwriting is basically arbitrary arrangements of boring riffs, even the drumming is spectacularly lazy. There's seriously nothing done right on this entire album. It's a whirling vortex of uncreative bullshit.

I'm not entirely sure how I managed to suffer through this thing like four times, but I definitely know that it's not going to happen again. Even goths are too stupid for stuff like this.

This album was presented by The Ethereal Travel's label as "Gothic Doom Rock" or something along those lines. What we have here, is your basic melodic, trippy Hard Rock with female vocals and some violins here and there, but this has nothing to do with doom and gothic genres.

The album starts quite promising with the folksy and up tempo first track which falls short because of its rather short lenght and lack of climax, and the horrible guitar solo at its finale (which I must say, is a common thing in the whole album - the solos are dreadful). Violins are a nice touch, female vocalist can't control her voice very well and falls out of tune in some places (on the whole album actually), but she has a nice voice. The next track is arguably the best one on the album, quite simple but melancholic and effective. And from there, the album goes straight down to hell.

"Mirror Man" is horrible with its amazingly horrible solos and childish chorus. "Hunger" is a very 80s Hard Rock tune that sounds out of place on the album and it doesn't work. By the way, did I mention that the guitarist also sings on a few songs? Well - imagine the most horrible German power metal vocalist and still it is nowhere near as bad as this. "Bells" is once again very simple and effective in a way, with Poe's poem of the same title used as lyrics, but every emotion the song builds up gets eventually destroyed by the "...said Edgar Allen Poe" line at the end of the song. I mean - hell, what were you thinking?!?

The production is weak; problems with drum sounds, dry sounding guitars, bad mixing. And what's unbelieveable to me is that the instruments sound out of tune in quite a few places. Which doesn't help much in case of the weak production, the bad songwriting and the negatively loose performance.

Overall, this album (probably) looked good on paper but the theory doesn't work in practice here, especially because of the lack of talent in guitar department and the lack of experience in vocals. The album has its -very few- moments but at the end of the day, this is just a waste of time.