The Pathway

After a brief separation the boys of Officium Triste thankfully regrouped and put out their second full-length album. The joy felt was brief however, because said album fell very short of the bands debut in pretty much every way possible.

First off, the ONLY good songs on this are the first two tracks. Both of them are brimming with intense doom and emotional goodness, its the five songs that follow that drag this album from amazing to just above shit.

The production is better than their debut but that does nothing to save this festering waste of sound. The guitars are pretty heavy with the bands trademarked melodies and harmonies. There are even a few solos mixed in with the mostly chug happy songs. Their distortion is thick and songs are played well.

The bass has never been an interesting feature in this band and this album is no different. It plods along as expected. The drums are outstanding as usual however. What little excitement there is to be had comes from mastermind drummer Martin. The vocals are always a treat with this band as well. Pim has a very unique vocal presence and this album is no different except that he sings cleanly in a few places and has a surprisingly good voice.

The lyrics are the standard bag of Doom topics. The one exception to this being that their English/grammar isn't the greatest but this doesn't detract from the songs (except for Camouflage).

Over all this album sounds as if it was thrown together at the last minute. Not that songs sound rushed but that they weren't fully explored. This hinders the album because the songs are very dull and don't really go anywhere. How you can go from sheer brilliance on your debut album to utter trash on your second is up for debate.

Officium Triste from Rotterdam is without a doubt one of the best doom metal bands in the Netherlands, if not the best, and after their debut album 'Ne Vivam' and several 'smaller' releases, 'The Pathway' is their second full-length album. In contrary to ‘Ne Vivam’, which was obviously inspired by My Dying Bride, ’The Pathway’ has more of an own identity. The MDB influences are still there though, but in my opinion that's not really a bad thing - and after all, there are worse bands to be compared with, aren't there?

The first song on this album is "Roses On My Grave", which could already be found on the similar-titled EP (1999) and the ‘Promo 2000’. The beginning of the song is quite fast, but shortly after the tempo and feel change into slow and heavy. Quite a good song to ‘open up’ with, but the absolute highlight of the album is the second song “Pathway (Of Broken Glass)”. Heavy, bombastic and orchestral are the keywords to this song, which is dominated by beautiful dramatic melodies and desolate sounding guitar riffs. Except for the 'beautiful dramatic melodies', the same actually goes for "Foul Play". Track 4 ("Camouflage") is to me the weakest song on the album, mainly because of the mediocre clean vocals of vocalist Pim Blankenstein, who sounds much better when simply grunting. "Divinity" and especially "Deep Down" (the intro of this song sure reminds you of "The Cry Of Mankind"...) make the level rise again. "This Is Goodbye" is in essence quite a good song, but again the bad clean vocals spoil the fun (or the sadness, whatever you prefer). Add the raw, 'dusty' sound quality to this and you have a rather good album with some, let's say, cosmetic defects. Officium Triste can do better than this, though, and you'll only have to listen to their third full-length album 'Reason' to agree with me on this.