The Pain Sessions

It's such a shame only eight releases exist of this surprisingly clear, crisp sounding recording. The first and fourth tracks are the intro and outro tracks, and consist of soft ambient soundscapes played alongside the forefront piano work. There is little to say here except it sets the mood of this release extremely well, and the outro track ties up the general motif in essence.

The second track, The Procession of the Black Fog, blew my mind. This track mostly reminded me of a funeral-doom version of Xasthur, without all the noisy black metal work (replaced with more crisp and clear and haunting riffs...Xasthur is in comparison noisy and distorted.) Don't get me wrong, there's quite a bit of distortion within the guitar parts (which follow a more funeral-doom-ish pace than the more typical black metal with light doom/goth influences Xasthur produces), but this distortion actually fits the music very well. It's haunting, like Nortt, but it goes somewhere. Nortt typically revels in the funeral-doom and expands within minimalistic means.

Dictator actually progresses forth.

Within The Procession of the Black Fog, the vocals even fit the music well. Something most black/doom bands have a hard time finding would be the right vocals/vox fx. Despite this, Dictator has it down beyond what I expected; there is plenty of eerie vocals I expect of Willie Roussel of Mütiilation. I do not mean to compare this vocal perfection to other artists except to express how this made an impression upon me. For instance, if you've heard Agalloch's song In the Shadow of Our Pale Companion, it is of my opinion that the vocals fit perfectly into the music, and I was very impressed about how well it sounded together. For funeral-doom, I think Dictator fits the epitome of vocal perfection. It's dark, not too heavily fx'd, doesn't lack pronunciation (like 90% of all death metal/grindcore bands) which is to not say I can understand what he's saying - I can't, however it's very ominous.

Even within track three, Emptiness, there are clean vocals being utilized, and it sounds normal with the guitar/drum/keyboard part. The clean vocals contrast in a melodic way the more distorted, funeral-doom-ish guitar progressions. It's interesting to see a funeral-doom band move past just a few chords as well with this new age of minimalist-drone. The complexity of the music should be stressed especially in track three, the guitar solo around 6:30 to 7:00 minutes in is even jazzy and reminds me of some of Stefan Kozak's solos (the brains behind a group of french black metal bands such as Mystic Forest, Eikenskaden, and Bolverk).

The songs are mixed so well that this couldn't be remastered in any sort of way. What I can really appreciate about a band is perfect volume balance between everything, especially from one man bands.