Summer's End

So this is Autumn’s second, and thankfully last, attempt at making a gothic metal album. The lineup is mostly the same as the last album’s this time around, but includes the addition of a certain Jens van der Valk, who I assume is currently a main creative force behind Autumn considering he’s still in the band to this day. I don’t know how much input he had into this album besides some lyrical contributions, but the band seems to have polished up their sound a bit this time around, refining some jagged edges and removing some of the more egregiously offensive elements entirely. The stupid narration pervasive in the last album is gone, the keys get shunted to the back of the songs and their cheesiness is toned down considerably, and the growler gets a lot fewer opportunities to ruin songs (I think he only has 3 or 4 passages in the entire album). The beginnings of their modern, rockier sound also start poking out in places here, although not always to the album’s benefit. Unfortunately for Autumn, they’re still not very good at writing songs at this point, so while this album isn’t actively irritating to listen to unlike Lust, it’s still not very interesting.

Listening to this, it sounds like Autumn were trying to move away from their kooky medieval sound to something more streamlined and modern. The tinny orchestral keys are still there, but the range of sounds and samples have been expanded a bit; there’s some kind of medieval flute that pops up in “Gallery of Reality”, something that sounds like a sitar in “Silent Madness”, and lots of random little electronic-inspired samples scattered throughout. They end up buried a bit too far back in the mix, which is a shame because they add some interesting flavor to the songs they appear in. Even said tinny orchestral keys are improved quite a bit from the last album, since their only role this time around is to provide atmosphere, not smother the songs in shitty plastic strings. It makes the songs sound much more in line with a lot of 90s gothic metal à la what After Forever were doing at the time, and while I’m a little disappointed that they more or less dropped the medieval atmosphere entirely, their execution of said medieval atmosphere on the last album was so atrocious that I still consider its removal to be a net plus.

It’s a good thing that the keys are better, because most everything else about this remains pretty uninspired. The guitars, while much louder in the mix this time around and cranking out a cool doomish riff or harmony every now and again, are still mostly stuck in their role of playing boring power chords and chugs to make this music sound heavy. Nienke still sings on here, but outside of the closing ballad “Solar Wake” where she gets to emote a little more in her voice, her performance is solidly unremarkable. The album tries really hard to grab your attention, especially with the keys and growls and some newly added male backing vocals, but none of the songwriting is interesting enough for any of it to make a real impact.

Autumn did make a real attempt at working on the shortcomings of their last album here, but only removing some of the bad elements and superficially improving one element of your sound doesn’t suddenly make your music good; there needs to be real ideas and real inspiration to fill the vacuum. Gothic metal Autumn had neither, and if they had continued down this road they would have ended up consigned to the trash bin of metal history without a second thought. Fortunately, the three members who I assume had the bad gothic metal ideas ended up leaving a year later, and with new blood coming into the band Autumn ended up transforming into an absolute tour de force. Just stick to listening to anything Autumn put out after this; this is really just background music at best.

If there’s one thing Holland is known for (asides the windmills, infinite flow of legal drugs and other… dutchy stuff), then it is perhaps the Dutchmen’s passion to create female fronted metal with as much as symphonic elements you can stuff to an album. Indeed! With the success of Epica and Within Temptation, it would seem only obvious for generic female-fronted-symphonic bands’ to spring in dozens if not hundreds.

The latter, which Autumn absolutely is not: yes, it is a female fronted band, and yes – there are symphonic elements used. Heck, even the Epica- style weak growls are present (as the single worst thing of the album perhaps)m but Autumn is far from generic.

It’s not even Nienke’s alto vocals, which make it raise it from the rest of the lot, though the fact does have its impact, but the sheer art of songwriting: unlike its numerous kin, Autumn chooses a less symphonic and (I daresay, more rockish) path. In the very front of the mix are the guitars and vocals, accompanied by an occasional piano, whereas the usual keyboards fall at the background where they should be. A more exotic instrument surfaces every now and then, though these give little to the songs themselves.

There reasons for a mere 85% lie in the relatively annoying growls as said before, in the tediousness of some lyrics and in Autumn’s ventures towards a more ‘traditional’ symphonic sound. Yet ballads such as the closing track ‘Solar Wake’ make it an atrocity to drop the score any lower than that.