Forever Mine

The ubiquity of home recording technology and its subsequent advancements over the past 15 years has been something of a double-edged sword, particularly when combined with the mass communication capabilities of the internet. Naturally universal access should be celebrated as a superior outcome to a handful of stuffed suits dictating what is and is not music, but this comes with little in the way of any kind of filter that separates the unsung greats from the rubbish. Among the sea of bedroom black metal projects to sprout out like cancerous polyps in the 2000s (technically late 90s) was a mostly one-man project out of California dubbed Echoes Of Silence that fancies itself a symphonic black metal affair. The resulting sound is perhaps better likened to a poor man's Limbonic Art with the production value of the in-prison era of Burzum, minus the tact and with a far shallower well of ideas to draw upon.

Though billed as more of a demo and preview to the later LP Love Embraces Death, which would contain all of these songs, Forever Mine gives an accurate depiction of this now defunct project's general sound. All of the instruments are produced synthetically via Fruityloops, which makes for something that might sound like a reject from Super Castlevania IV that is painted over with a slew of incomprehensible vocalizations that can best be likened to wind gusts being captured by a cheap microphone. Occasionally these breathing noises will give way to what sounds a bit more like robotic, low-toned gibberish as if a vampire with a severely cleft palate were struggling through reading incantations in Pig Latin, and at one point sole project member Leviticai/Neil Andersen throws in a few woefully out of place pig squeals, as if he were auditioning for his later brutal project Homophobic Fecalpheliac.

When getting past the computerized production and extremely annoying vocal work, which is all but impossible, what one is left to decipher is essentially an extreme form of symphonic meets Gothic tinged minimalism that gets played out by the third song. A lot of very similar ideas work their ways into each song, so much so that it is often difficult to know where one ends and the next begins. Just about every song on here sounds like it is written in the exact same key, played at about roughly the same tempo, and circles around the same 2 or 3 chords. Generally when songs drone on in this manner the idea is to cut apart the monotony by injected an atmospheric angle into things, which is a non-starter given the tools being employed, and while the songs are all fairly short in scope they tend to drag and blend together into a one 26-minute pile of sameness that might make for a good downer before bed were the synthesized drums and guitars less grating on the ears.

About the only thing that is really compelling about this album is the song titles that adorn these tracks, which give some foggy notion of what Andersen was attempting to pull off here. But given how much of a failure this album was in terms of execution, the whole thing just gets lost in translation and comes off as a repetitive cycle of occasionally coherent noise. Even in the most low-fi of demo releases that came in with the early days of the Norwegian 2nd wave of black metal was there anything to this reviewer's recollection that came off this woefully directionless and puerile. It's a forgone conclusion that the world of metal music has become a better place since the internet dissolved many of the barrier to entry that existed for independent artists, but if the tycoons that still hold sway at the major labels ever wanted to make me work to defend that position, they'd start by pointing to albums like this.

This review is dedicated to the memory of Christopher Santaniello, aka Diamhea. (R.I.P.)