LEÇONS DE TÉNÈBRES

I happen to like some dark ambient stuff in the key of the gothic orientated bands such as Rosa Crux or Die Verbannten Kinder Evas but what Elend offers on their first studio output is unwillingly ridiculous. The band name is German and means misery. This effort is indeed miserable.

The songs are all slow paced tracks with terribly artificial keyboard sounds, random violins without much inspiration and a couple of piano melodies. There is not much development in the single tracks and it's all very slow and repetitive. This creates a hypnotizing atmosphere and could fit to a soundtrack of an adaptation of a visual novel or an experimental film noir but with nearly one hour of running time and without visual support the whole thing gets quite boring.

The worst thing is though the limited blackened screams that rather make me laugh instead of adding a creepy atmosphere. The narrative clean vocals are already better but not quite diversified on the other side. The female vocals are randomly included in most of the tracks add nothing interesting to the whole concept apart of including another worn out stereotype of the gothic ambient genre.

This music might actually gain some value for dark romantic nights with your dearest or on a cold autumn day but I would still go for some other similar records then. The best track is probably "Eclipse" with its appeasing clean male vocals, fitting piano melodies and not too bad sounding keyboard passages. This song would actually be quite good if there were not once again these ridiculous blackened screams in the last thirty seconds or so. As most of the other tracks even contain more of this garbage at earlier points of the songs, this track is my favourite one on the album. Some other songs include no blackened vocals but simply make me fall asleep and lack of any innovation.

The worst song is probably the heavily stereotypical and boring album closer "The Emperor". At that point I didn't care anymore and skipped this piece of trash when I was three minutes or so into this overlong song.

In the end, I would suggest you to stay away from this album and go for some musically similar acts such as Autumn Tears or even Dark Sanctuary. These bands maybe came out a couple of years later than these so called French pioneers but sounded already way better than this. If it was me, this record could have remained eternally hidden in the shadows.

Originally published on www.metal-archives.com on August 10th of the year 2012.