THE UMBERSUN

A bit of a let down, this album.

Elend's three first albums were good avant-garde classical albums with some good melody lines. They dropped this melody based formula on this album and went........ on empty.

The music is still pretty heavy with classical instruments. My guess is sampled philharmonical orchestra instruments. Figure a 100 pieces strong orchestra and you get the instruments here. Add both male spoken words, male vocals and female opera vocals too. The music is very dark and claustrophobic at the same time. It is like watching a closed up flower while waiting for it to let the sun get in so the bees can do their work. That never happens on this album though. It is like an exploration of an submarine, many miles under the surface.

In short, this is a pretty mediocre album with not much going for it.

2 stars

Ugh, seriously? The melodic underpinnings of their quasi-orchestral sound were what made the better moments of the previous few Elend albums work to the extent that they did, so the extent to which they are played down here in favour of ambient orchestral groaning is disheartening. The idea of orchestral-ambient darkwave isn't a terrible one, but the execution here is a bit of a disaster.

Ambient music does tend to sound a bit samey, granted, but the trick to writing a good ambient track is making it sound intentionally so, and to somehow grasp the secret of making it nonetheless feel satisfying in its own right: when your composition ends up sounding like the extended intro to a song which never actually quite manages to get started, you know that you've made a pretty serious misstep, and that's exactly how Elend come across here.

To make things even worse, the death growls and shouted vocals are even more incongruous and risible here.