Give Me Light

Darkseed has experimented with different sounds, but we could say that “Give me Light” is based in traditional metal but sharing some similitude with Gothic Metal bands, and don’t get me wrong, they are surely not bringing old school goth-rock elements, just similar elements to Gothic Metal, like depressed lyrics, acoustic guitars, and guest female vocals.

I can’t explain this album without recalling the band Sentenced, which has also brought acoustic guitars and depressed lyrics into traditional metal, plus, both bands have deep clean singing as well. I would definitely recommend this album to Sentenced fans, specially if you enjoyed the last albums of Sentenced, but I must warn that Darkseed changed its style after this album.

“Give me Light” does not show any complicated technique, the album is all about melody, feeling and distortion. The first song, “Dancing with the Lion”, has plenty of palm muted guitar riffing for the verse parts, something often used by goth metal bands such as Entwine, Charon, To Die For. The vocals are clean, nothing of death metal vocals here, just clean singing and catchy lyrics for the chorus, truly like goth metal bands do.

“Cold” could be the boring song of the album, sometimes even sounds doomish, but the next songs are just awesome. “Echoes of Tomorrow” has the same goth metal palm muted riffing in the verse, and the chorus has quite a good melodic metal guitar, the chorus is quite catchy and its also followed by female vocals, guest singer obviously. I could say that “Echoes of Tomorrow” is the best song of the album, that part when the female vocals appear are also coming with a potent blast of guitar riff, very impressive.

“Journey to the Spirit World” is another awesome song, the beginning has quite a good metal riff of drums and guitars that could rock pretty much anyone, there is plenty of melodic distortion and catchy lyrics too. Other songs like “Give me Light” have similar things, catchy lyrics, melodic guitars, quite good distorted riffing, and well, all the album follows the same pattern, except for the acoustic version of “Echoes of Tomorrow” quite a good ballad, and again there is the good guest female singer.

As I said before, this album is for people who like catchy lyrics, and traditional metal with depressed lyrics, so I recommend it to goth metal fans. “Give me Light” is quite a good album, in fact I must say that this could be the best album of Darkseed after the “Ultimate Darkness”. An awesome job.

I picked up this album not knowing what I would expect, but I was relieved that it was descent enough to play it again. Darkseed is an interesting band that has the ability to be great. They alternate between Death and Gothic vocals, sometimes in the same song, or having different songs with different sounding vocals. The Gothic vocals sound very sufficient in the song “Echoes of Tomorrow”, which is also one of the highlights of the album. The acoustic version of the song is also pleasant to listen to, as it is probably the best song on the album.

The album starts off with the song, “Dancing With The Lion.” Now, this is a good song, but the band uses too much of the same formula for their other songs for this album to truly stand out. There is a difference between a band’s signature sound and using the same tired composition of songs throughout the entire album, which this band does frequently. Because the songs are enjoyable to listen to, it does not have a huge impact on the overall reaction that I got, but if the songs were slightly weaker, I would have lowered the score that it received.

The song “Fusion,” which is the seventh track, was pretty useless. It is basically a melodic rendition of some techno song, or that’s what I got the impression of, anyway. I understand that it was used as an intermission track, or at least I hope so, but it really does not strengthen the album. It does have an appealing sound to it, but it’s definitely not metal, and not what I expected. It also goes for the 11th track, which is “Desire.” It’s basically an intermission track to introduce the hidden 12th track. Totally useless and I thought I was listening to some easy listening shit for a minute and 40 seconds.

The rest of the tracks like I said follow similar guidelines to the general sound of the album, alternating from Gothic inspired Metal to a more Death Metal approach, but only for a bit, with a few growls and heavier guitars here and there. The album could have used a bit more variety and more of the Death Metal aspect that the band shows on some parts of their songs. Overall this album is descent. It’s a good album, if you’re into “lighter” music, but if you’re into something that will make your head bang, look elsewhere.