Dark Embrace
Bitter End (Promo) 2004 None
Sometimes more musically more predicable bands are the hardest to review. When a band mostly combines the sound of other bands into their own it's hard to not just write down one sentence mentioning their influence and then desperately trying to write a review around that one sentence. After all, what else is there to be said? In a sense Dark Embrace faces me with this very problem. Don't get me wrong, Dark Embrace make good quality music, but in essence they sound as if somebody threw Moonspell, Empyrium and Cradle of Filth into a blender and added a small dozen of other gothic-metal, doom-metal, dark-metal and black-metal for some extra flavour. The music shifts from slow, yet melodic gothic-doom to fast black-metal-ish parts. The vocals shift along just as quickly, from clean vocals to semi-high pitched screams, from spoken word to grunts. Still I would not write Dark Embrace off as just some cheap knockoff band. Many bands have tried to combine all these styles, and this usually ends up in very incoherent albums where the band has lost all sense of musical direction. Dark Embrace in a welcome surprise, actually manage to pull it off quite well. 'Bitter End' is not trying to sound like 20 bands at once, forcefully passing through double the amount of genres in each song. There is actually direction and vision to be found, and more importantly structure. In this sense they remind me of Lacrimas Profundere's 'Memorandum'. So think what you want about bands like these, but it still takes quite a bit of skill to combine genres like this and Dark Embrace clearly have what it takes to do so. They make a few mistakes here of there (on 'Fragility of Life' the keyboards just sound off in some sections). If you are into a moody, semi-romantic mixture of dark-metal and gothic-metal then Dark Embrace is definitely worth checking out!	1. Dying Breath (intro) 2. Bitter End 3. The Treat of Flesh and the Libidinous Storms of Silence 4. Fragility of Life Approx. 18 minutes
Reviewed by: Aldo Quispel