Now releasing their second album Winds of Disillusion, Italian dark metal act Apostolum once again show a strong penchant for gloomy, melancholy songwriting. Most of these six tracks are quite dense and contain many layers, with various keyboard embellishments, brass, and an assortment of vocal styles giving an epic feel to these lengthy songs. Elements of gothic doom ala My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost mix with some of the more straightforward black metal of say a Satyricon, which you can hear on the ghastly but quite melodic "Higher Planes of Existence". In other places, you can hear the bands progressive sensibilities, as on "Unworthiness and Decay" or the massive near 19-minute epic "Gleam of Lucidity", the latter of which contains some really nice guitar work and plenty of ragged growls and clean spoken word chanting. Though there is plenty of atmosphere on Winds of Disillusion, I'm left wanting a little more on the riff department. Though a few of these songs are fairly heavy, they are heavy in a ponderous way, and the riffs are somewhat generic and unimaginative, like on the closer "Debris of Perception", which could have been a really killer track with some heavier and more inventive riffing. All in all though, this is not a bad album, but perhaps needed some varied pacing in spots and certainly a few more original riffs to really elevate it even further.
Track Listing
1) Intro (Light into The Void)
2) Unworthiness And Decay
3) Higher Planes Of Existence
4) Less Than A Step
5) Gleam Of Lucidity
6) Debris of Perception
Printer Friendly Page
Send to a Friend
