Видящий нас

Sorrowland is a young Symphonic Dark/Gothic Metal band hailing from Russia. They formed in 2006 and released their debut album nearly two years later. The album, with has a Russian title but translates to something like “Those Who Look Down on All of Us”.

The album starts out with an atmospheric intro, with a somewhat a-tonal keyboard sound accompanied by quite evil sounding male/female choirs and a sombre melody created by organ, keyboard and violin sounds. The first track, which roughly translates to “The Holy Grail” starts has a long instrumental intro, which is quite atmospheric and bombastic before the metal kicks in. Although I understand the Gothic reference, this is only borderline Gothic on a great deal of the tracks on the release and could easily be described as Symphonic Black with Gothic influences, especially due to the vocals. These are handled by Anna who has quite a varied style of singing, ranging from clean soprano to screaming Black Metal-ish passages. At times there is support by a male choir and male growls, but Anna is the main focus. She does a good job on the screaming, but she has a great clean voice, which I prefer to hear (but that’s just my personal taste I guess). All lyrics are in Russian by the way.

The playing is excellent and it is hard to believe the band was formed just two years ago, because they could easily be veterans.

Not surprisingly, I enjoyed the softer tracks the most, most notably “Lullaby” is a great track, with great guitar leads and Anna sticking to her great soprano voice. Also worth mentioning is “The Temple Forgotten by God” which is a great sad atmospheric track, which relies solely on Anna’s voice and a keyboard melody.

The album is entirely home recorded, seeing the band does not have the financial means to do a professional recording as of yet. Hence, the sound quality is not perfect, but they did a great job nonetheless. I would actually have believed this was a studio recording if the band wouldn’t have mentioned it.

The band informed me that they are already working on new material. They plan on moving more towards a Death/Black style, but retaining some of the Symphonic/Melodic elements of their present sound. Which might be good news for some, but I hope they will not become to brutal, because that is not exactly my cup of tea.