Perverse Devotion

A moronic front cover and an equally lousy back that shows an impaled corpse welcome the fearless listener who wants to explore the art of Dark Plague. I start becoming sceptic. Unfortunately, my premonition comes true. The French formation is totally out of order and this album is nothing else but a waste of resources.

In accordance with the visual appearance of "Perverse Devotion", the production sucks as well. Maybe caused by a low budget, the album sounds flat, artificial and simply bad produced. Its monotonous mix has not much in common with the usual approach of the genre. To top things off, the vocals sound as if the singer has put his head under water. His constant shrieking fails completely to evoke any kind of emotions. Of course, every group is free to decide that it wants to play a cold-hearted and more or less mechanized form of extreme metal. But Dark Plague did not seem to have this intention. Their type of black metal is just tasteless and emotionless. I wish there would be more variation, more dramatic sequences and more atmosphere. The problem is that the predominantly fast-paced songs rush by without leaving an impact.

Driven by a nervous snare drum that seems to suffer from asthma, the guitars are not able to play their trump cards. In other words, Dark Plague's song material is almost brutally meaningless. The band reaches a certain degree of grimness, but that's all. No thrilling breaks show up, good riffs excel by their total absence and the songs are absolutely interchangeable. Furthermore, the usefulness of integrating a minimum of melodies is completely unknown to the musicians. The guitar leads want to generate an ice-cold aura, but their amateurish song writing destroys all hopes right from the beginning. Okay, we may not forget that it is a debut. Yet we should also not forget that even debutants do not have the right to kill our nerves. The first pretty decent part emerges in the sixth number of the album. I guess this says it all.

It may be that the band members do not lack of perversity and devotion. But they do not have the slightest idea how to create a coherent song. Enthusiasm alone does not make a good album and nobody needs a scene that has more bands than fans. Anyway, the members of Dark Plague seem to be men of conviction. Probably in order to show their hate against the human race, they have already released a second album. I will check it out, because it cannot be much worse than this gruesome debut.