Zeit
Drangsal

We weren’t overly complimentary about the debut album by German trio Zeit two years ago, now they come with their second album Drangsal. The title means Tribulation and that is what it is to listen through this album, we are about as impressed with this album as we were with the previous one. The artwork on this album feels a bit boring, perhaps they got tired with the tribulations creating the cover and ended up with something looking quite uninteresting.

Sludge, black metal is probably the genre descriptions that can be used to describe this album. Quite slow and dark with slow and slightly monotonous tonality and the same can be said about the slow and growly vocals that we hear when listening to this album. The vocals are in German, making the ununderstandable to most people but for growly vocals the German language is quite good. As the album is slow and pretty monotonous with little variation it feels a bit too long and it would be preferable with a shorter album.

Too long and not very exciting, this album isn’t the greatest one I have written about this year and I don’t even think that it beats the predecessor that was about the same as this one. There are no songs that grab the attention, the pace is slow and kind of works a bit detrimental on the lust for life among the music fans. It doesn’t ever fly or excite, a plus for the German vocals but besides that there isn’t much to be excited about when it comes to this album, there are many bands in this genre that are better and more interesting.

If you are a fan of the sludge stuff you might be impressed with this album, I doubt it but there is that chance. The best thing about the album is that it isn’t awful but that isn’t really a good argument for a purchase and personally I think this one deserves to be gathering dust in a storage shelf somewhere. That may seem like a harsh thing to say about a band that pours their heart and soul into their music but that is the sound of it and no heart or soul can change the fact that this album is far from being impressive – it isn’t even good.

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