Mercury Rain
St. Matthieu
3.6
A concept album from this French Goth/Dark metal act, and while die hard fans of Lacuna Coil and Transmission Record's roster (Asrai, Epica, After Forever) may dig this, personally even for the genre, this is a pretty tepid offering.
Typically pompous and synth laden with a female lead and occasional throaty male injections, Mercury Rain are purely by the Goth metal numbers and even then they messily scrawl outside the lines with off kilter vocals, a flat production (normally a reliable staple of the genre) and the overall ‘synthetic’ feel of the album nullifies any lush organics that is supposed to be the strong point of this kind of metal.
While aiming for ‘epic’ (With the occasional use of Therion –esque choirs) and ‘dark’ (the religious theme and subsequent structures), the album instead comes across as languid and monotonous. The album tries to be a more forceful, earthy take on Gothic metal with some up tempo tracks (“Shadows Scent”, “Chimera”, “Eldritch Mirror”) that try to liven up the morose ambience with a more driving guitar based approach; they are no more impressive than the album's wistful sullen ballads. Drawn out over the top attempts at darkly hymnal Goth overtures such as “Sortileges” and the overdrawn title track are pure Goth fodder with little or no real character or passion. Partly due to Sonia Porzier’s slightly flat and atonal voice and the placid forced crunch of the guitars, the album just never comes close to any of the bands mentioned above. The tinny synth work of Jon Hoare is second rate and rudimentary not adding anything epic or grandiose to the already lackluster proceedings.
While Nightwish take their share of flack for being overly epic and cheesy, Mercury Rain can only hope to attain the same kind of atmosphere even if their sound is slightly darker, it still lacks everything to make a good album - style and substance, something their immediate peers, while not necessarily any of my favorite acts, have in spades.
Just not a very good album by any stretch of a gothic or darkmetal imagination.
