The first thing I noticed when getting this CD in mail was the outstanding packaging, truly the most beautiful packaging I have seen for a CD. Yet one cannot judge a book by its cover, right? Well, maybe for this release you can. The first song "Jernlov" starts with a moment of clean guitar that instantaneously leads into high pitched shrieking backed by low growling, accompanied with music that you would expect to follow the vocals, fast and furious of course with symphonic keyboards, then after the first verse its back to the clean mid-paced guitar, then back to the fast and furious. This pattern of brutality mixed with beauty is a pattern well incorporated in this CD and is done marvelously. The clean vocals are top notch, the high pitched shrieking is also well done, yet at the end it seems like he is having trouble keeping it up on "when the moon is on the wave", the lyrics are not dark not evil, they are artsy and poetic and philosophical. This CD is truly unique and perfect in almost every way in the way it creates darkness in the music and not the lyrical content. The only flaw is in "countryside bohemians"... I must say I couldn't bare the line "...we ate the saucy beef, we drank rumanian red...", I don't know, that's just me. Other than that this is one of the best releases of 1997, symphonic, brutal and melancholic...all in all a beautiful piece of work.

© 1998 malefic