Realm of the Dead

The title is not ment as an insult. It is actually a wery good description of Purgation. They have major Black Sabbath influences which they use to preach christianity. When I say preach I can feel most of the readers backing up, but there is nothing to fear. They don't preach God directly. They talk about society and all the things that has gone wrong. How the government takes over and remowes the rights of the masses, and making them hedens. On the other side the people follow the orders blindly, distancing themselves from God. I guess you could call the lyrics christian/punk. If there were no religious parts in the lyrics they would actually have been much the same as the ones you'd hear from Bad Religion.

Mid-paced drums and heavy guitars push their way through the tracks in the ways of traditional doom. They work together with the drums to constantly fill the lower part of the music. This leaves the upper, brighter part free to the occational single guitar solos and the vocals. The vocalist has what I'd call a thick voice. Like he is singing with the back of his mouth. The vocals really does fit the music as they are just about equally thick.

The sad thing is that even though they fill out the lower part of the musical scale, they have a blank at the bottom. The sound never really reaches in. Instead it begins to sound plain after a track and a half. This has a really negative effect on the listener because it keeps them from getting engaged in the music. Instead the music just drifts by. The riffs are good, and so are the lyrics. But unless you take care to listen well to those things, this won't be an album amongst the memorable.

Interpretation of the tracks:
-Watching The World Die: starts the album by putting the listener right in the middle of Purgations music. This is not a bad thing as the track has absolutely no need for an opening. The track is evenly mid-paced, and unthypically for doom-metal, the track seems to slightly skip along. The vocals sound strained to put just that effect on the music itself. The lyrics take on the government, or "big brother" as the lyrics call them. There is not really much that would link the lyrics to christianity besides the reference to the final judgement. Instead they consentrate on telling how the government tears it all apart in their own blindness.

-Eulogy (Part II): is heavier than the previous track. It's also more pushing than Watching The World Die, but they have kept much of the strained vocals. Though there are relaxed vocals inbetween. The word eulogy means "a praise of a dead person", and that is exactly what this track is. It is the eulogy of a false messiah. A false messiah that seeks to lead people away from God and into hedenship, and who will only lead himself and his followers into the fiery pit below.

-Slumber: is the slowest of the tracks. And also the heaviest. This is the opposition to Watching The World Die. Slumber reaches out against the masses who lets the government act blindly because they are not awake to see it. The vocals are more relaxed now than in any of the other four tracks. They only tensify when the vocalist yells "wake up!". Which just underlines the whole point of the song. To wake up the masses so they can see that the world is going down unless they do something now.

-Realm Of The Dead: is the last and most aggressive of the tracks. The vocals swap quickly between a stubborn calm to being really stressed out. A good way to show the frustration of telling people they have to wake up, but still you cannot go further than your ethics allow you to. And it's not enough to make the masses listen. The music as the vocals change constantly from being slow and heavy to a higher pace. The realm of the dead is the world as it is now, full of non-believers and with a government which does not care. They are the dead because when the final judgement come they will not reach the heavens.