Supremature

As Divine Grace is an obscure Finnish band which doesn’t seem to have ever known what it wanted to be. They’re said to have begun under the name Morpheus, playing death metal (though I never heard anything from this previous incarnation). Then they discovered well-known British death/doom bands (you know, MDB and the likes), so started to play death/doom metal. Coming to their full-length Lumo, that one leant towards gothic doom metal and I described it as a poor Galadriel clone. Eventually, they dropped out every metal element to record a pure goth rock album – the one we’re talking about now. Tell me, where is the meaning of all this?

There’s no need to beat around the bush, Supremature mostly sucks. While I happen to enjoy goth rock when it’s good, I otherwise hold this genre for being responsible of amongst the worst musical abominations I ever had the chance to hear, when it’s bad. Allright, there’s rap as well, but we’re still talking about music, madam. Coming back to our wonderful release, to get an overall picture of it just take the shittiest recent The Gathering song you can think of, then repeat it ten times, and that’s Supremature. Indeed, suggesting this comparison might be a bit harsh... with The Gathering.

It starts quite decent though; what explains why I don’t give it a totally sea-level mark. Don’t misunderstand me, I only said decent, nothing more. Your Julie may show languid, sleep-inducing male clean vocals but still carries this slightly chilling, unpleasant atmosphere one is expecting from this kind of music, especially because of its sad acoustic guitar – most guitars being moreover acoustic here. After all, this track is hardly worse than the latest Paradise Lost offerings. The same goes with the equally mellow Morbide except for the boring pop-ish male vocals replaced by boring pop-ish female vocals. Eventually, Personal is THE lively and mostly electric-guitar-driven track, so no wonder I might consider it as the best. What isn’t saying much, well, we may just have switched from the last Paradise Lost to the last Katatonia, in every case it’s still mediocre.

Then from the fourth track on the album totally collapses to never recover, but as it’s not falling from very high there won’t be much damage. Ninety percent of acoustic stammering, cheesy backing keyboards, and with each track the female vocals becoming more and more pop-ish and annoying. Granted, some songs are sung by the male singer, but there’s little difference between the two anyway. Musically speaking those tunes have lost any kind of shape, as if the album was purely melting down. It isn’t gothic rock any more, it’s liquid rock. Sorry, it isn’t even rock any more, rather a succession of amorphous sounds which may occasionally show a semblance of similarity with pop music.

The last nail being put on the coffin with the abysmal The Most which isn’t only more pop-ish than your worst nightmares, but out of tune. This is simply the kind of track which would irremediably kill any album regardless of how good the following songs are. Don’t worry, they’re all equally pitiful so there’s nothing to regret. The ultimate irony being they called Ferocious what might be the mellowest track of all (and this is saying A LOT). So, what if this release was nothing more than a joke? Alas, it sounds very unlikely, and even if it’s a joke, it’s not even a good one.

From what I managed to gather about As Divine Grace, sources diverge on whether they’ve split up after this album or not. They may still be officially active, though silent. But frankly, who cares?

Highlights: don’t bother