Progarchives, the progressive rock ultimate discography
Elend - Leçons de Ténèbres CD (album) cover

LEÇONS DE TÉNÈBRES

Elend

Crossover Prog


From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Bookmark and Share
3 stars A new band and a new musical dimension has been introduced to ProgArchives.

Although, Elend is not as much trailblazing in today's standards as they were back in 1994 when I got this album. A very tasty digi pack, no less. This album was released on a metal label called Holy Records and did perhaps miss out on what could had been their main audience. But this album was still a pretty big hit in the sligthly confused metal scene.

How can I describe the music here ? Well, it has it's background in chamber and classical music. Goth classical music, it is best described as. But it also have a lot of goth metal in it. References are Lacrimosa and early My Dying Bride. Elend is more leftfield and far more classical than MDB and Lacrimosa. The instruments are basically the classical orchestra instruments. The screamo vocals though brings in a lot of elements from goth and black metal though. So does the female vocals too.

What Elend is doing on this album is an aquired taste and far too radical for most of ProgArchives many followers. This album is a good album, but only that. I get the feeling Elend was still looking for the magical twists on this, their debut album. This album is one of the strangest albums the metal scene has ever spawned and it also opened up the scene's eyes for classical music too.

This is a good beginning of Elend's discography....... and that's it.

3 stars

Report this review (#431405)
Posted Tuesday, April 12, 2011 | Review Permalink
1 stars 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.

Report this review (#808964)
Posted Thursday, August 23, 2012 | Review Permalink
Warthur
PROG REVIEWER
2 stars A rather odd little debut, wavering between majestic neoclassical darkwave like a more orchestrally-focused Dead Can Dance on the one hand and some sort of weird attempt at death metal dungeon synth on the other, with the combination of occasionally cheap-sounding keyboards and slightly unconvincing screamed vocals providing the dungeon synth and death metal components respectively. The album is far more successful whenever shouting is refrained from and gorgeous soprano vocals issue forth instead. The consensus seems to be that subsequent albums are better, and whilst there's supposedly a conceptual trilogy at work here I suspect you wouldn't miss out on a whole lot if you skipped this.
Report this review (#1637813)
Posted Monday, October 31, 2016 | Review Permalink

ELEND Leçons de Ténèbres ratings only


chronological order | showing rating only

Post a review of ELEND Leçons de Ténèbres


You must be a forum member to post a review, please register here if you are not.

MEMBERS LOGIN ZONE

As a registered member (register here if not), you can post rating/reviews (& edit later), comments reviews and submit new albums.

You are not logged, please complete authentication before continuing (use forum credentials).

Forum user
Forum password

Copyright Prog Archives, All rights reserved. | Legal Notice | Privacy Policy | Advertise | RSS + syndications

Other sites in the MAC network: JazzMusicArchives.com — jazz music reviews and archives | MetalMusicArchives.com — metal music reviews and archives

Donate monthly and keep PA fast-loading and ad-free forever.