This Gift is a Curse
I, Guilt Bearer

This is gift is a curse, what if you receive this album as a gift from someone. A cursed gift is probably nothing neither you nor I want to receive, the cover of this one also looks ugly as hell if I am honest. Question is wether or not this reflects on the content of the album, most of the time it does but not always and you should never judge a book by its cover and that is something I never do. Having given these swedes a good going over though i think I am ready to judge them by the content within its cover.

Harcore combined with black metal with occult touches but also with some sludge stuff and some other stuff as well. The music is aggressive but not all the way through, there are some touches of doomier stuff as well. I wouldn’t call it particularly heavy though, neither will I call it well produced as the sound is rather poor. I don’t suppose poor sound is seen as much of a problem for them though, albeit I don’t think that they wanted to be tame though. The songs are quite long and nine in number which make up for an almost fifty minute playing time which is a tad on the long side for a hardcoreish album but then again it isn’t really a pure hardcore album, is it? No it is not, there is a lot more to it.

Despite it is more and has a lot more than your everyday hardcore album, it is still bad. Especially the opening song is quite poor with being only instrumental abuse along with pointless grouchy vocals. After that song the album picks up a bit and it even has one or two decent parts but no good track and nothing that is really interesting. For one thing the album is too long, it is too tame and it is boring. It is really hard to see the point of an album like this, I instantly didn’t like it and playing through it eight to ten times hasn’t really changed that point of view.

One argument for this album though might be that I don’t really like hardcore or black metal so maybe I am not seeing the good about the album, but at the same time I am probably a good representative of the general rock fan who prefer more traditional rock or metal music and after all there is only a very small percentage of music fans who cares for this kind of music. So maybe you should leave a little reservation to what I am writing about this album, and for you who enjoys black metal or hardcore the story might be different to mine.

But aren’t there any good things about this album? I don’t know, it is not overly exciting but the fact that it is at least not so bad that it makes you vomit or bleed from your eye sockets might be a positive in a way. The fact that the album improves towards the end is another slight positive but neither of there are really good enough to change this album from bad to something better. It is still a bad album, you may have a differing opinion if you are a fan of the hardcore/black metal genre but if you aren’t you do best in avoiding this album.

So in the end the default answer if someone asks about this album is to avoid it.