Darkfall
At the End of Times

Austrian band Darkfall takes us to the end of times on their sixth album in an illustrious career stretching all the way back to 1995 and the first album was released in 1998, almost 20 years ago now. Isn’t it strange how time flies by? The press release claim that the first two albums were really successful, something I will have to take their word for, their latest album was released in 2013 and rereleased earlier this year. This new album has a cool and exciting artwork and has been both great and poorly received in reviews I have read when researching the album, I think that the truth is probably somewhere in between the really bad and the great.

They call thrashed death metal and perhaps that is what it is, darker melodic metal thrashier and more brutal than most melodic death metal. The Austrians offers ten tracks of brutal death metal with strong melodies and all of that stuff. Quite long album as well with over fifty minutes of playing time and not that much variation, that makes it for a long album to go through. And the album is sort of something in between, neither really this nor that which in theory is great and in practise it is great sometimes – this time it doesn’t work. This album should have been a bit less melodic I think, the vocals and the more aggressive parts don’t really fit together with the more melodic parts which makes this album a bit incoherent and a bit less good.

Sure, it isn’t a bad album in the regard that it really stinks and it is impossible to listen to, it is just an album that starts out promising to then become a rather dreary story. I think the idea the band works from is better on paper than in execution and in the end I find that I listen to an album that doesn’t really do much for me. Darkfall has put together an album that might appeal to those who like death metal but the question is who will like it, the ones that like the brutal and classic death metal or the ones who enjoy the more melodic kind of death metal? I am not sure it will appeal to any of those, and who remains then?

The first track is good and probably the highlight of the album, what follows is not anywhere near as good, I would actually describe it as quite dull. The album is too long and doesn’t have enough variation and it should have been either more melodic or less melodic, as it is now I just don’t think the album is interesting enough to merit any more listening to – and when I am summarising it all I think that the artwork is probably the best thing of the album.

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