Despond

You guys cannot be serious.

Like, I've seen some truly awful and dull albums get a ridiculous amount of praise from people before but this time it's almost as if there's some inside joke I'm not in on where we give praise to horrid albums for a laugh. There's no way in hell this tepid, crude album could really have this amount of acclaim. Just please tell me this is an elaborate joke so we can move on.

...No?

Ugh. Okay, whatever. A couple of things before we begin though: Yes, I adore doom metal. I listen to doom metal more than just about any other subgenre of metal, especially funeral doom - Esoteric, Evoken, you name it. I'm also a big fan of many of the bands that get a lot of praise for being very introspective and depressing - Warning is a prime example. All great bands, all have great outputs, no complaints from me. Secondly, I really wanted to like this, I try as hard as I can to make sure there's no bias in my opinion to any unfair extent. I was initially very excited with this an expected some highly emotional, dark and crushing doom metal. Where this is nothing unique, it doesn't need to be, it stands very well by itself.

But then I was unfortunately greeted by what can only be described as a complete and utter failure on nearly every single level that matters. Despond is tepid, dull and surprisingly even soft for an album of this kind, there's nearly no 'crushing' aspect to this whatsoever, the cleanliness and softness of the album completely cripples it. It doesn't even stop there, there's a myriad of issues with this album that just cut up any kind of potential it might have had - and to be fair there are aspects in this that show the band do have a shred of potential. Some of the riffs are really good despite how they're played in such a soft manner, some of the cleaner bits sound really good. 'Cut Up, Depressed and Alone' has a good riff and a nice break into a more quiet bit where the clean guitars and bass create a nice despondent groove, it shows that the band do know how to create atmosphere. Which is then subsequently ruined by the vocalist.

Guttural vocals aren't bad by any means, but here they just don't fit - doom metal like this is all about the negative emotions surrounding it. Perhaps not all doom metal like this, but certainly this album. Best of luck deciphering any of the emotion from this guy's delivery since every single word he sings sounds the same as the other apart from undistinguishable changes in syllables. I'm a believer in the fact that you don't have to decipher words to be able to feel the emotion in a performance but here all you get is this tepid low rumble that disrupts many of the good moments this album might have had. Similar to the guttural in Uaral's more doom-laden tracks, it's just distracting and sometimes even laughable. Perhaps if this album had an element of heaviness to it this delivery could have worked but the way this album sounds is literally the polar opposite of that and it just sounds ridiculous. As for more of a definition on the sound itself, the thick chords of doom aren't really present here. Loss use a more 'airy' and open kind of chord, slowly struck most of the time with a really melancholic kind of tone. This works some of the time, but becomes tiring very quickly when the stark difference between the vocal delivery and the soft style starts to grate at you more and more as the album plods along, and I mean plod literally. The pace of this album is just about unbearable, even by doom standards, simply because of how uninteresting and inoffensive everything in this album is.

Good moments are scarce - the death metal inspired section in 'Open Veins to a Curtain Closed' are a nice respite from the monotony, especially since the vocal delivery is more raspy and far more impressive. Not to mention the clean vocals used in 'Silent and Completely Overcome' is, again, a really nice respite. It's certainly not a vocal delivery I'd wish on the entire album but I found myself enjoying it more than any of the other moments. That is, until the guttural come back in with an almost laughable riff under it. The drums are standard and enjoyable, occasionally breaking out of the ordinary with a couple more chimes gracing the palette which makes the album a little bit less of a drudge so props to the drummer at least, shame he doesn't have better material to work with. I also far prefer it when albums that deal with strong themes do so with an ounce of grace and subtlety, something Loss can't seem to do. Don't read this as 'if it's not dressed up in metaphors I'm not interested', far from it, but with song titles like 'Conceptual Funeralism Unto the Final Act (of Being)' and 'Open Veins to a Curtain Closed' that these guys are trying so ridiculously hard to be as depressing as they can which is, again, very distracting.

This just about defines the album, small amounts of potential with the most distractingly awful things imaginable littered all over it. In fact it's so undepressing that it almost reaches its goal - almost. Ultimately there's very little to salvage, it's too soft to be striking and it's too offensively bad to even be background music thanks to the vocals and dreary delivery of just about everything. The bits with potential are cookie cutter at best, the rest is just a cringe-worthy reverb-laden mess.

So uhh, yeah, it's depressing all right. You can count on that.