WINDS DEVOURING MEN

Winds Devouring Men kicks off Elend's second trilogy of thematically-connected albums, and it's evident right from the get-go that they spent the five years between The Umbersun and this album extensively retooling their sound. The death growls on previous albums are scaled right back, and there are more clean male vocals, and musically the influence of Dead Can Dance - never enormously far away in darkwave material like this - is dialled right up.

In fact, that's kind of the problem - the band seem to slip back very easily into merely offering up a cheap pastiche of Dead Can Dance, perhaps hoping to win over fans of the superior band during that group's long hiatus. Unfortunately, they clone Dead Can Dance's sound well enough to make me think "Hey, this sounds a bit like Dead Can Dance", but not well enough to make me think "I will continue listening to this because it sounds a bit like Dead Can Dance" - instead, I just think "Eh, I'll just listen to Within the Realm of a Dying Sun again instead".