Where Twilight Dwells

Midnattsol’s debut album is really lacking in almost every category of making music. One would think that a folk metal act from Norway that features the little sister of Liv Kristine from Theatre of Tragedy stands a great chance of becoming a folk metal masterpiece. Sadly, this is not the case for poor Midnattsol. As I stated before, the band members fail in everything they attempt to do.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a complete failure. There are two solid, and I only mean solid, songs on this album. “Lament” and “Haunted” give the release its only 4 points. Two points for each. These songs are somewhat good due to fair songwriting, and the fact that they are actual metal songs. However, both of these songs are not good songs due to the performance of Carmen Espenaes. Her vocals are dreadfully annoying and flat out horrible sounding. She has a terrible sounding accent, absolutely no power, and virtually no singing ability whatsoever. She clearly was hired by the band just because she is the sister of Liv.

Besides those two songs and the album’s opener (which is not as great as they wanted it to be) metal music is very lacking. The remaining eight songs are nearly all acoustic with the ghastly singer featured. I love acoustic folk, like Ulver’s Kveldssanger, but when your vocalist sounds like granny singing in the shower, there is no hope for crafting acoustic magic like the afore mentioned Ulver. At least when Garm did it, he sang beautifully and dominated the album with his very powerful voice. Here, we have an acoustic mess of poorly written melodies and a weak singer atop of it.

When the band actually plays metal, they can write fairly effective songs only to be ruined by Carmen’s painfully repugnant vocals. Guitars are solid, with good riffing here and there, but still very inconsistent.

The drum work is nothing special, just your typical drummer for a project with female vocals. No speed changes, no time signature differences, and certainly no blastbeats can be found here. Just 4/4 (common time) keeping the beat throughout the album.

This album is very atrocious and does not grow on you over time. Avoid this album if you like good vocals and real metal. Do not purchase the album just because it is Liv’s little sister, because you do not want to sit through this garbage even once. This is not even worth downloading.