My Lament
Beneath the Hidden
6.1
As milked dry as metalcore, deathcore and melodic death metal are, there are still a few sub-genres left relatively untapped in the modern metal realm. Doom/death metal is one of those sub-genres, and Belgium's My Lament makes its promising but often trying contribution with this three-song demo, titled Beneath the Hidden.
With its lumbering, lethargic passages it immediately reminds me of Katatonia's Dance of December Souls, but the moments of spoken word give Beneath the Hidden a different eeriness than that found on Katatonia's debut. True, Bert De Visscher is a slightly less interesting vocalist than Katatonia's Renske, whose cutting pitch was blood-curdlingly good, but the spoken words act as a better narrative tool than Visscher's harsh vocals anyhow. We hear this most strongly on the last song, "Silent Nights." With the back-to-back interplay between harsh and clean vocals, which is actually exclusive to this one song, we sense an urgency in the vocals that helps create a murky, almost choking atmosphere. However, a problem arises when one begins to notice how paper thin the act can really be when the bad riffs are given too much room and the great riffs are cut short.
While Beneath the Hidden presents a solid front with a good set of riffs and powerful vocals, the music tends to drag because My Lament doesn't always stress the stronger passages of each song. For example, "The Spirit and the Haze" would be a fascinating song if it skipped through its first four minutes, but the band somehow finds it necessary to play with a boring riff for a while before getting to the meat of the track. There simply aren't enough layers present here to get away with stringing a mediocre riff along for a few minutes, and this is what ultimately prevents My Lament from reaching that upper tier.
