And Hourglass of Lifetime

This album is really weird. Everything about it is odd as hell, and not exactly in a good way. Animae Capronii's 2008 album And Hourglass of Lifetime (well, one of the several albums released that year by the one man behind the band) is pretty uniformly bad; I hate to admit it, but there's really not much I like about this at all.

I'll let someone dumber and more superficially fixated give the "Christian black metal is consistently horrible" rant, but really, one would have to grasp at straws that are practically microscopic to find anything above mediocre quality in this album. I hesitate to call it a black metal album, as a matter of fact - there are more keyboards present in the music than guitars, I could count the amount of blast beats here on one hand, there's more singing than rasping or shrieking here, and overall this feels more gothic and folky to me than it does cold, nihilistic, withered, hateful, or any other adjective one might use to describe black metal. The songs are pretty consistently mid-paced, never really slowing down to a Filosofem-esque crawl and maybe getting up to blast speed once or twice throughout the whole album. I don't know if it was intentional, but the end result of all this is some of the most non-threatening metal music I've ever heard. For the most part, this sounds like something that black metal musicians would sing around a campfire in between talking about how great Finntroll or Týr or *insert some folky metal band here, I'm sure you'll know a better epitome of the genre than I do* are.

The guitars are very thin and raw, and while this certainly isn't a problem in and of itself, they're usually pushed to the very back of the mix, essentially being used as a melody-following bass guitar while the keyboard synths are up at the front making the primary leads and melodies. I don't think I would need to elaborate on how silly this would sound in execution, but it's goofy as all hell, to the point where it basically sounds like cybergrind with folk metal influences. These melodies aren't particularly complex, either, so they don't really possess the sort of flair necessary to keep me interested in something this unconventional. The vocals don't fare much better: the harsher vocals are pretty much standard installation for bedroom black metal (a rasping, mid-pitched, emotionally neutral caw), but the singing is pretty awful. It sounds rather lazy all-around, and is too sharp or too flat more often than it should be, but what's worse is that it's almost always double-tracked, and the harmonies range from slightly good to astonishingly atrocious. (There's one section at about 2:58 in "You Torn My Heart into Pieces" that honest-to-God sounds like a homage to The Shaggs, with its off-kilter and childish singing, odd rhythms and generally autistic mood.) These are all rather simple melodies, dude, you could have easily settled for harmonizing with fifths and called it a day.

There's almost always several melodies going on at once, and while I can usually see what the band was trying to create by combining them, they're sometimes mixed improperly (so the backing melody is given more emphasis to the human ear than what you're actually supposed to be focusing on) and the end result sounds pretty wonky - a good example would be the outro for "Splendour of the Cross", where the keyboards end up creating a big yucky chunk of dissonance as a result of being way higher in the mix than they should be. Actually, that's pretty much the universal problem here - way too many keyboards. Yeah, the programmed drums basically being restricted to rock beats gets kind of annoying, and the vocal harmonies aren't that desirable, but above all And Hourglass of Lifetime would be a fair bit better if the guitars were at the front of the assault, rather than being forced to stay buried in a bunker while the synths take center stage. A bit more groove certainly wouldn't hurt these songs, either: they adhere almost exclusively to 4/4 time signatures and considering the folky, campfire-reminiscient way in which the keyboards are used here, I think a bit of a swinging pace would actually help this quite a bit. I'm pretty sure this album isn't trying to be as dark and threatening as most conventional black metal, but even if it isn't, there are much more graceful methods of pulling this off.

To conclude, this is so extremely cheesy that all the Europower bands in existence yelled out a collective "DAYUM!" when it was released. I mean, you can't really fault And Hourglass of Lifetime for being generic or for all the songs sounding the same (because they don't), but it's all just so bad that I don't even want to give it points for being original. Yeah, there are a few decent parts here and there (the blasty BM section in "Splendour of the Cross", which basically sounds on-par with all other bedroom black metal bands that are actually playing black metal the majority of the time; the outro riff for "My Last Tears" is pretty nice, even if it sounds like an 80s alt-rock riff that got lost and wandered onto a gothic/black metal album; and both "Dethroning Lucifer" and track 11 [a cover of a band I've never heard] are relatively pretty good if only because they are mostly devoid of keyboard synths), but overall there's really no reason any of you reading this would ever need to, or logically want to hear this.