SaraLee
Darkness Between
5.2
SaraLee is a six-piece act from Finland that play goth influenced rock n’ roll, and due to this album’s lack of overall heaviness the music can’t really be considered metal. Although they as a band claim to teeter on that fine edge between both rock and metal, I would say they are more along the lines of easy listening dark rock with no balls whatsoever. As a result fans of MetalReview looking for hard hitting, in your face music will want to look elsewhere. That being said, lets take a look at what this disc has to offer the listener, regardless of your musical tastes.
Darkness Between is made up of songs that are straight up depressing and almost ballad-like. They are so melancholic that when the listener does finally wake up to a more up tempo piece in certain songs, that peppier sounding section seems lost and out of place and inevitably lulls you back to sleep. The riffs in these songs are forgettable and the lack of power in the guitar sound gives this album a generic feel that makes it suffer terribly as a whole. Overall there are eleven total songs on here and after giving this album ample listening time I still have a hard time differentiating one song from the next. There is a typical and predictable structure to each song that never has the listener guessing what might be coming next, and as you might expect this creates a loss of interest at a quick and detrimental pace during the listening experience. The singing is clean and melodic for the most part with only a couple of sections offering a low growl that is mixed very low and doesn’t really add much to the effectiveness of the delivery. What would make this band more appealing to the metal listener would be to forsake the clean vocals altogether and go with some heavier sounding gutturals to help give this music some much needed attitude. That’s not to say I feel that all music should involve heavy vocals, but the clean singing on this album is a bit too soft and spongy to be taken seriously by our daily readers.
All things considered I think there is a lot to be said about this style of music and I’m not totally against the exploration of it, and with some tweaking in all the right places SaraLee might have what it takes to put together an album with more memorable songs next time around. On the whole this album doesn’t offer the metal community anything new and exciting, and lets face it…our mission here at MetalReview is to steer you, the listener, toward the finest METAL for your dollar. Save your money folks, 2006 is sure to offer up plenty of solid metal albums in the months to come, and we’ll do our best to point them out to you when they come along.
