The Weeping of a Thousand Years

The Weeping of a Thousand Years is an interesting piece of metal. It certainly makes its own impression, and boldly explores its own direction of dark doom metal. There are ideas and concepts, and the execution is original and ambitious. But is it a success? Well, we have the advantage of hindsight after a decade, and maybe it's time to pass a judgement of sorts on this intriguing creation. Because no matter how good or bad you consider the album to be, it is intriguing in its originality and experimentation.

"Dark metal" is a term often found in the genre descriptions of various bands. It is a parallel of such definitions as "extreme", "raw" and "viking" in the sense that it describes a certain attitude, lyrical content or image more than the music itself, and does not in itself define the music well enough for most practical purposes. While "extreme" can be coupled with practically any established genre, "dark" is a more complex concept. What is it supposed to mean? Dark power metal" does not sound very feasible, while "dark" or "darkened doom" is a relatively widespread idea. The most common characteristic I have discovered among the bands labelled as "dark" is a sort of deep hopelessness, and attitude of inevitable and unavoidable grief and loss. In a way every dark metal band seems use both the music and the lyrics to paint a ruthless picture of the world; a world in which giving up is the only viable option and nothing can ever be merry and joyous. The happiness of a funeral is often coupled with the diseased thoughts in a torturer's mind, or the horror of the serial killer's victim just before the last flash of the serrated blade. There's nothing you can do and nothing to hope for, and everything is, in a single word, dark.

Deinonychus explored that darkness in a novel way on The Weeping of a Thousand Years. Their music was not founded on any ruthless sonic assault, nor a deep growl sometimes found on doom metal, nor the shrieks and manic drive of black metal. They approached the idea of darkness from a deceivingly soft angle, like the one embraced by some funeral doom bands, and used careful songwriting and well-chosen shades of sounds to create a solid foundation of melancholy. On that foundation the vocalist, Marco Kehren, then laid the actual brickwork of the facade with a multitude of vocal styles. Unfortunately, while the foundation is solid, the brickwork lacks the mortar to really hold together, and the beautiful founding masonry of a gothic abbey is wasted under a building that resembles a apartment block in the former DDR. Kehren crosses a line or two too many in his search for extremes, and with minor help from a few bad choices in the instruments and production, manages to single-handedly spoil an otherwise remarkable piece of music.

Most of the time Kehren just speaks with a melancholic voice or sings softly, and the keyboards create a kind of a soundscape, often with a pure piano sound. The guitar stays in the background, sometimes singing alone its crisp undistorted song. The bass is all but inaudible, and the drumming is mostly very light-handed. The atmosphere the components conjure is melancholic, emotionally charged and weighty. The problems start when Kehren turns into his "dark" vocals. He does everything from deep, low singing to screaming, shouting and shrieking in an attempt to sound tortured or insane, but my honest opinion is that he fails. Big time. He fails badly enough to make me feel embarrassed for him, and that is a major achievement. You know the scene in the movie "Big Lebowski" where the nerdy landlord does his solo theater piece? Well, there you have it, the feeling of transferred embarrassment. Someone should have told him that this sucks, go home and don't make a fool of yourself, but nobody has had the heart for that. The performer is left on the stage, continuing the inane idiocy and possibly thinking the audience likes everything they are witnessing. But no, nobody is rude enough, and Kehren spoils the atmosphere of a decent album, and manages to sound really, really bad.

He actually sounds so bad that to really explain the lousiness I must use an overused and slightly offensive adjective for it. The word is "retarded", but in a much more literal sense than usual. Kehren manages to shriek like an eight year old trapped in a grown man's body, making a kicking-and-screaming show-and-tell performance next to the cash-register in a supermarket after his loving mother has refused to allow him a second Twinkie. I can't hear his vocal work as "tortured screams" or "agony", he just sounds blatantly retarded. A friend of mine uses the term "Ayshire technique" to describe the vocal delivery style of the irish Cranberries singer. You simply must know their song "Zombie", with its wholly random and unpredictable switches between a normal female voice and a creepy falsetto, right? It makes her sound like an enraged cow. Kehren manages the same, only sounding like a living horse being turned into salami at the same time. Retarded, indeed. He really makes me wish someone had been politely ruthless enough to tell him to stop such idiotic attempts and stick to the parts he does well. This could have been a good, atmospheric album, but Kehren turns it into a radio transmission that is being attacked by a drunken punk-rocker radio amateur bent on singing his auto-masochistic song on top of any music being played at the time. The vocals don't really match the rest of the music, and the incompatibility thrashes the whole beyond recognition.

There are some other annoying details. The most obvious is the badly chosen crash symbal, likely tiny and made of tinfoil and pices of aluminium roofing, and banged with endless passion on some random parts. But still, most of the album is indeed very well composed and performed, dark doomish stuff, ominously soft, good enough to sound very mean even without distortion.

So, the darkness in this "dark metal" is approached via two separate paths, through the softly threathening music and the annoying debile shrieking. What is left, in the end? An ambitious attempt at doing something unconventional, an album that is unlikely to leave anyone indifferent. Everyone is going to either love it or hate it, it's the ultimate opinion splitter. I suspect that most of us would not fall in love with it, I certainly didn't. One half of the experiment, the overall softness, is very successful and likable. The other half, Kehren's vocals, is not. The two halves do not fit on the same album, and the schitzophrenic experience leaves a confused aftertaste, and that ultimately turns into mild aversion.

If misery and melancholy could embody itself into a physical form, it would no doubt manifest itself as Deinonychus. Every single track from “The Weeping of a Thousand Years”, is full of lamentations, Marco Kehrens vocals are so genuine it really gets spooky.

In tracks like “A Gathering of Memories” and “Lost Forever”, he seems to go into trances and periods of wailing. It is very hard to explain to someone who has not heard his unique style of vocals a sense of what its like, for it is very unique and terrifying. It is literally an anguished cry, which complements the slow, doomy, music.

“I have done as you did” and “Upon the Highlands I fought” have similar marching style drums, in the back discreet keyboards add a macabre background for the uncontrollable screams and demented poetry. The lyrics all deal with suicide, ghosts, and overall a big sense of loss. Most of the songs have a very “Dracula” kind of atmosphere, for example, the beginning of “The Awakened” sounds like something played in Dracula’s castle.

All the tracks have unique changes in the tempo, from slow, to ultra slow, the screams give way to a clean low voice form time to time and the music fades into long atmospheric passages that seem to hypnotize and make you loose track of time. This is definetly music that requires patience and understanding to completly enjoy.