VOICES OF OMENS

Rwake play a strange mixture of doom metal with some sludge and black metal elements. They call themselves experimental but honestly said the overlong songs are quite redundant. A few atmospheric passages and acoustic parts awake some interest but apart but not enough to be called experimental or progressive. There are some addicting interludes and instrumental tracks with alien vocals, acoustic guitars and some floating moments. Nevertheless, almost all songs turn out to be blackened doom songs with weak random voices that roar, yell and scream random lyrics. It's a quite complicated and mixed sandwich with this band as they have some talent and good approaches but really don't know how to focus on and develop their strengths.

Each time I wanted to abandon on this album after boring stuff like the horrible sucker "Crooked Rivers", the band came along with some short and fairly interesting calm or atmospheric passages like in the more diversified "Of Grievous Abominations" and so I made it through the entire record but the enjoyable, original and gripping passages can be resumed to ten minutes on this one hour record.

There are way more addicting experimental black and doom metal bands out there that have a much better level in their first efforts than this band on its fourth strike. The cool band photos and the amusing cover artwork are pretty much the only outstanding things left in here and that's not enough to evolve. Maybe one day the band will awake and focus on its talents and be more atmospheric, calm and structured in the future. It will be a long way to the top though. But it's possible. As for this album, you really should avoid it and look for something else.

Originally published on www.metal-archives.com on October 7th of the year 2011.