Elandør
Dark Asylum

Dark Asylum, an interesting album cover with lots of emotional darkness in it, a cryptic and distinct band name. This bodes well I thought about this album and the fact that it is the second one on Echozone I review since we got a bunch of music from them didn’t make it less interesting considering the quality of the first album I reviewed from there (Hannibal). So I had high hopes for this album which happens to be the third for the Elandør moniker, I say moniker because this is the first time they are a band, a trio in fact. Before they were a one man show by Markus Kühnel, but now he has joined forces with a duo of musicians. When I did my usual sweep around the interweb I found that there isn’t that much written about this band and I could only find one review in an understandable language, the rest were in languages like german and finnish which isn’t quite my forte and we all know how badly google translates things. But the ratings were fun, ranging from really poor to really great, which is a bit odd since otherwise albums are always great around the web.

Gothic rock is probably the description we could use, then spice it up with many more labels if we like that sort of thing. It is quite dark but with keyboards that are really cheerful, something that creates a bit of a strange feel to the music. It is kind of like having your family mutilated but in the midst of that tragedy you still cannot help laughing as it was Ricky Gervais who mutilated them while making really funny jokes. The song Butterfly sounds exactly like a rape in a Ball Pit at McDonalds (I have no idea if something like that has ever happened but if it should be soundtracked it would sound like the song Butterfly). It is a strange album I would say as it combines light and darkness in a way that makes no sense at all and mainly it becomes ridiculous but not in the It Bites way but in a ridiculous way. They would have won a lot by toning down the joyous keys but also those bloody awful darkish vocal stylings the singer is doing because they really suck worse than a vacuum cleaner in a stamp factory. It is much better when the singer sings more in his normal voice which he also does.

54 minutes is how long we have to listen if we desire to hear all thirteen tracks and while we listen we just come up with strange mind imagery as this album actually sounds a bit like being stabbed while laughing or something in that style and these things are all you think of while listening… well, you also really wish that it would end. Eleven of the tracks are really ludicrously bad and should really be run through a shredder so that they would never be unleashed upon the world again. Two tracks are not so bad, Violet is miles better than most on this album and even if it is far from The Birthday Massacre’s efforts it is still a decent tracks, at least it is not bad. The penultimate track Buried Alive is actually good and one that I like listening to despite it having this really bad vocals at times, it also has good vocals in the chorus and not those very cheerful keys which makes the track make much more sense than most on this album but it would be good on almost any album.

It is never fun to discard a band or write them down as poor but most of this album feels like a joke, so I would recommend that you find your gothic rock somewhere else because a pair of decent tracks can never make for an interesting album. Thing is though that this album had the looks of something special but the only thing special about it musically is the silly tragedies it coveys. It is an album that makes no sense for a sane person to look into, to be honest I don’t think any of us insane people like it either. One great track and one decent track is all that is worth having from this album, besides that it is ridiculously bad.

HHHHHHH