...AND ALL MY EXISTENCE IN VAIN

'And All My Existence In Vain' is the second song on Kathaarsys' second album, 'Verses In Vain'. This is a Spanish black metal band that plays an epic breed of metal, with song lengths on the album usually going over the fifteen minute mark. With that said, I was fairly surprised to see that Kathaarsys released a single to promote the album, let alone a full track. With the sort of music and approach that Kathaarsys takes, it would have been pretty unfitting to cut any of the songs on it into radio edits. '...And All My Existence In Vain' is a fairly representative track for the album, a sixteen minute epic that goes through many different ideas and moods, and therefore takes a few listens to properly digest.The band always takes their time to make a point, as these vast song lengths well allow, and let the compositions sizzle steadily. Kathaarsys features a soft-heavy dynamic similar to that of early Opeth, but the music is rooted in atmospheric black metal, similar here to what Wolves In The Throne Room do. This particular song does not necessarily stand out from the other four on the album, and it indicates what the rest of the album is like; melancholic, dynamic, and admittedly a little long winded for its own good. The band has plenty of good ideas that they string together in this composition, and for all intents, this is a powerful episode of black metal. The songwriting with the band gets a little weaker in the aspect of how they organize the ideas in any case; as I said, the music is very good, but there is no way to distinguish this from the other epics on 'Verses In Vain'. No melodies or ideas are repeated effectively, and the song ends without much sense of climax. This anemic sense of flow within the song keeps me from calling '...And All My Existence In Vain' excellent.