Artist: Sirenia
Album: Perils of the deep blue
Genre: Gothic Metal
Release Date: 28th June 2013
Label: Nuclear Blast
Album Review
SIRENIA made a beautiful album. I am a long-standing fan of their first work, a masterpiece named ‘At sixes at sevens’. It is the essence of "beauty and the beast"-like vocals (female and growling together), overlaid by melodic "dark orchestration". After that release, however, the band was not capturing my attention for a while, and there I have a chance to review their sixth release called ‘Perils of the deep blue’. As said on the band’s website, it is “a very diverse and complete album that sums up the bands career in addition to adding new and exciting elements. With this album the band shows that they have staked out their musical path and perfected their unique style.” While many artists usually try to impress a reader with overblown introductions, I would agree with the self-characteristic this time.
I shall praise the music. How many times, a band would seemingly have everything necessary for a strong work - experienced musicians, good ideas and sound, nice artwork for good measure, but in the end their music would sound kinda boring. Here we got the absolute opposite. Instrumental parts are long and extremely captivating, melodic and beautiful. Torben Veland is a master and doing great for a while. Not every song I would call a hit, but there are some real gems. I shall praise the great level of sound producing. It's 21st century definitely - a complex, well mixed sound, crystal clear and multi-layered. There were a lot of tracks going into mix and they are well defined, well separated and very well tied together. When Torben's "dark", growling vocals are intermixed with the orchestral music, it's really electrifying. What else we have here? Fast drums, clean guitar solos, female vocals by Aylin (mostly high pitched but sometimes pleasantly deep - band should use low tones in her voice a lot more!), an a lot of classical instruments.
Still, SIRENIA on this record feels somewhat a prisoner of the gothic genre. It's a good question, where you'd draw a line between matching yourself to target audience and "doing things your own way". The announced diversity, as I feel, is simply a division between creative approaches. Some songs are your typical gothic ballads, where nothing much captures attention in song itself and it is more interesting to listen to orchestral parts. I'd simply call them "fillers". Other part are the songs where Veland's compositing talent is going completely unleashed. Other manifestation of the genre are the song names that are 100% Goth - such as ‘My Destiny Coming To Pass’, ‘The Funeral March’ - and the lyrics. Is that bad? For SIRENIA, probably not as much. It blends well with the music, with overall execution, and I have no particular issues at all - just saying. As a side note, the album features some Spanish verses on one of the tracks and ‘Stille Kom Døden’ is the song in Norwegian.
What about favourites? First, the beautiful intro. It's a short Latin prayer that indicates that you're about to listen to Goth record. I like ‘Darkling’ and ‘The Funeral March’ - the female vocal is more or less typical and does not make any "miracles", but when growling starts, song become really beautiful. Then, final tracks ‘Profound Scars’ and ‘A Blizzard Is Storming’ are quite captivating. It's like Morten finally meant to say "okay... I gave my label what they wanted, some typical stuff, now let's do the right thing". Vocals of Aylin become less high-pitched and more varied, melody seriously gains in depth and shows truly great parts, growling is now on par with clean vocals and everything is just so good.
Bottom line: definitely worth checking out, if you're into gothic metal. I give it 8/10 because still I am not so impressed by part of the album, but I still very excited about what I found here.
Tracklist
01. Ducere Me In Lucem
02. Seven Widows Weep
03. My Destiny Coming To Pass
04. Ditt Endelikt
05. Cold Caress
06. Darkling
07. Decadence
08. Stille Kom Døden
09. The Funeral March
10. Profound Scars
11. A Blizzard Is Storming
*Bonus:*
12. Chains
13. Blue Colleen
Line-up
Ailyn - vocals
Morten Veland - composer, guitar, vocals
Jonathan A. Perez - drums
Website
https://www.facebook.com/sirenia
Cover
Rating
Music: 7
Sound: 9
Total: 8 / 10
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