Our Only Hope Is Death

In my review for Requiem's EP, I offered redemption for that mediocre release by highlighting the positive aspects of the full length album that would follow it up. In hindsight, it seems I had completely forgotton what this album sounded like. Requiem's full length is one of the most blatently amateurish releases I've ever heard from any band and is not only guilty of the flaws of its predecessor, but of far worse.

The improvements this makes over the EP are few. The singer's death grunts are a little better, the drumming is more potent, and the band experiments a bit more by adding synthesizers into the mix (the beginning of "Vlad the Impaler" and the brief piano driven instrumental "The New Covenant"). Otherwise, all the flaws from before are made even worse. The guitar tone is exceedingly more shallow than before, resulting in heavily distorted riffs that lack heaviness. The band always straddled the line between raw and sloppy, but here they just take a nose dive into the latter territory. Mistakes are frequently audible in the guitar and bass lines, both in the timing and the volume equalization. The songs on this album are shorter, but rather than making them more focused and complete, they meander around new but uninteresting riffs and some really weak doom passages. All but the instrumentals are horrible structurally, with bass fills and clean fills inserted in almost at random. But worst of all are the backing vocals. On the EP, they were horrid shrieks the likes of which I thought could never be equaled in shittiness. On the full length, the backing (and sometimes the lead) vocals are clean. Which would be fine, providing they were IN FUCKING KEY. That's infuriating and torturous all at once, especially since whoever's doing them sounds like they're attempting to imitate the singer of Paradise Lost. All these flaws add up quick and make this unlistenable to even the most iron-stomached of death metallers.

I could have sworn that this album was better than this, but after relistening to it, I can offer no saving graces. This album is complete shit and it's no surprise that these guys never went on to release anything else. Another promising union of death metal and doom metal ends in tragedy.