Suspiria

Let's be frank: I consider gothic metal to be a phase, at least for myself. When an angsty teen, I lapped it all up eagerly: the emotion, the bombasm, the escapistic atmosphere. Now I see why it all appealed so much to me, and others of impressionable age, and I look upon it, as do so many old people on the follies of youth in general (for the record I'm 28 :).

That said, I admit I still listen to the stuff I have, semi-regularly, and with pleasure. I still like bombastic atmospheric metal, I'm still a sucker for escapism (even though I now see through many of the tropes), and I'll simply flick off the part of my brain that cringes at bad (teenage) metaphors for 'Darkness'.

And there you have part of my justification for liking Darkwell's Suspiria.

My introduction to Darkwell was a song on a compilation-album: Realm of Darkness. Slow build-up, synths for the main melody and the bridges, guitars mainly for texture. All this sautéd in a semi-operatic (but thinnish) female voice singing the darkness of her existence. Basically it's as full of gothic clichés as the Transformers movie was full of racism. However, instead of a harsh male grunter, they have this guy that..just speaks his parts. In the most hilarious deadpan delivery EVER. "This re-yalm of darkness. This...is her re-ward."

And that's the other part of my justification for liking Darkwell: sometimes it's so bad it's lovely and cute again. You shouldn't be reading my reviews and take them as anything other than my highly personal experiences, but an awful english mistake in the title of the first track alone? Love it. Sometimes the lyrics are so unintelligible because of their english that they seem deep and potentially profound.

On the other hand I genuinely love Stephanie Luzie's voice; it might seem flat, but her vocal melodies are subtle, and her warm, soft-edged voice (I'd classify it as the soubrette-subtype of soprano based on the wikipedia description) soothes me. That I grin stupidly at the sillyness of the dude's occasional 'singing' doesn't detract from that for me. And the fact that the rest of the music might not be anything more than typical (Central-)European gothic metal with long build-ups and hilariously bad lyrics makes this a *guilty* pleasure for me.