Lovecraft's Dreams

After a long day today, I was hoping to get an early night. When I remembered that I’d been sent some material to review, I cursed and prayed that it’d be some decent metal I could briefly describe before getting some shut-eye. Unfortunately, Lovecraft’s Dreams may prevent him from receiving a good night’s sleep.

This album seems to either be really brilliant or really shitty at any given time. Innzmouth seem to have gone for epic-style lengths on the album tracks, but this (as with many of these type of tracks) has backfired, and makes the music tedious to get through. The music itself is a nicely produced mish mash of doomy riffing, synthesizers and big, deep drumming. The album keeps a slow pace throughout: a quality that would be fine if it lasted for one track, but with this feel spread throughout the album it only serves to frustrate the listener. The album is half beautiful and half shitty, so I’ll write a paragraph on each of the points.

First, the good. The riffs are really doomy: dragged out, downtuned and chuggy. They create a decent atmosphere at times, and though generally pretty simple, are enjoyable to an extent. The drums are creative with their fills and beats, and are the main thing that keeps the music flowing and make it semi-listenable. I particularly enjoy the timbre and reverb effects on the drums; they sound like the drums off Bathory’s album Hammerheart. There are a few instances of arpeggiated minor chords used, such as in the interlude of the title track, and these are pretty cool. Bass is audible, though does little more than go with the main riffs. There’s orchestration on the keyboards, which is both good and bad. The good part is that the music is “beefed-up” in places by the keys, which add melody and emotion to the depressive guitars.

The bad side is that in some places, they just don’t fit. This is most evident at the beginning of the title track, where some weird synth pad creates what seems like an excerpt from an “X-Files” theme song above the acoustic guitar. The second noticeably bad aspect of this album, and probably the worst, is the solos. Once again, the title track showcases this best (or worst) – the guitar has clearly either been set up badly or is slightly out of tune. The solos don’t fit in places, and in others just seem too whiny and isolated from the rest of the music. They display pretty shoddy musicianship, too. It’s rather cringeworthy. I’m indifferent to the vocals: they’re monotonous death metal vocals, adding nothing to the music, but not taking anything away from it either. If anything, they serve to push this band closer to the death metal genre; indeed, by the end of this album, one is left with the feeling that Innzmouth are simply a death metal band with some keyboards and a slow pace. In fact, the best way to explain this album is that it’s a more bland, monotonous and boring version of Morbid Angel’s ‘Gateways’ album with shitty solos and attempted orchestration thrown in.

This album doesn’t really appeal to me. Now, I’m off to bed. Let’s hope I have better dreams than Lovecraft.