Darkness Eternal
Misanthropic Annihilation
6.7
I’m always very leery of one man projects as they seem to be singular displays of a single person's musical vision. Sometimes it works, i.e Falkenbach, Draugar, Xasthur, but in the death metal genre, the successes are far less noteworthy; Blood Ritual maybe? (name me 5 good one man death metal projects-no session musicians).
The one man in question here is Canadian George Valaetis and over the course of 4 releases has used Immolation, Incantation and Morbid Angel as his primary influences, so if you are hard over those bands, you might dig this. Me personally, I prefer something a little more creative and less cliched. From the title, artwork and song titles (hey George, Incantation called they want their song titles back), you can tell legend in his own mind, Mr. Valaetis isn’t the most original songwriter/lyricist in death metal, but loves his long, overwrought songs full of eerie goings on, lots of acoustics, and spooky samples. It’s not all bad, the songs are generally slightly more restrained and have an early 90s JL America quality about them (take that as you will), and some black metal layering thrown about, but on the whole for your hard earned cash, there’s far better death metal choices around (i.e. Vore’s Maleficus, Hate’s Anaclasis).
Still, if you absolutely must purchase some drawn out, decently produced, admittedly proficient but rather tepid death/black/doom metal, you could do worse; “Darkness Conquers All” has some nice harmonies, “For All the False Promises” could be construed as epic, “Suicide Unto Infinite Euphoria” is a crawling, depressive doom track that holds some promise, “Unholy Trinity” has a blackened lurch and “Upon the Throne of Eternal Blasphemy” sounds like guess who.
You liking this album depends a lot on if you like Incantation or Immolation and basically derivatives thereof. Mr. Valaetis is certainly ambitious and wears his influences on his sleeve especially vocally (Hey George, John McEntee called and wants his voice back) albeit a little too much and with it being a one man project everything gets a little too samey. Plus, with the generally 6-8 minute songs that really don’t peak or truly astound, the album wears on a bit around “Thy Will be Done”. Still, not an altogether bad effort, its at least well produced and with some focus on his decent harmonies and doomier side of things, could turn into a more solid, attention worthy act.
