The Midnight Opera

I... guess this is mildly better than 'The Grand Masquerade', but the actual difference in quality is so minute that I can't particularly recommend one over the other, or any early to mid-era Echoes Of Silence at all. Admittedly, this is a step up from the previous album; there's more going on and it doesn't feel as overbearingly simple and static, and some of the 'riffs' are mildly memorable if not particularly good. That being said, this is still nowhere near worthwhile music and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it seems to show that Leviticai is at least TRYING to improve.

The gothic melodies on this release are present but not quite as excruciatingly cloying as usual, making this one of the more definitely black metal releases in the band's catalog that I've heard. As the production quality of Echoes Of Silence essentially never changes, it's just as awful as ever, tinny and undeniably synthetic in a way that doesn't really fit even an 'electronic' black metal band. The central thing that makes this better than the last would be a better sense of pacing; individual riffs don't seem to drone on and on as long as usual and when they do there's at least some vocals over them to keep things... well, I guess interesting would be the word used to describe better music. It suffers from essentially all the same problems that this project always does: awful production, a very cheesy sense of melody, and haphazard, unmusical compositional ideas, but if nothing else this is not as bad a purchase as the previous album.

This point of the band's career does undeniably suck, but this is mildly less painful than the last album, so don't buy it, but at least devote a half second more to looking at it in a random distro before skipping over it and buying something more worthwhile.