Rainer Landfermann
Mein Wort in Deiner Dunkelheit

The cover photo of this album is quite wonderful, so you could claim that the album looks rather appealing. The album is the debut solo work by Rainer Landfermann who has been heard with the band Pavor and Bethlehem, a guy who according to some has the sickest and most extreme voice you’ll hear from a human. That would seem to contrast with the beautiful cover, the ten songs have a photo each in the book that is said to illustrate that particular song – I have not seen all photos but I think they are lying about that as I cannot see how these lovely photos can be connected to the songs in any way.

Extreme metal, kind of avant-garde with extreme vocals that are screamed, grunted, growled and whatever – the music is varied but the voice makes it seem monotonous. With another voice I think the music would have seem to have more depth. The production is otherwise okay, the tempo could have been a bit more up and we get a kind of music that encompass a wide variety of musical styles. The ten tracks seems to require a fair bit of time, it feels rather long even though the playing time is just over forty minutes.

It isn’t the most impressive album I have ever heard, the vocal styles is my biggest niggle – I kind of hate the vocals. And I believe that most music lovers will agree with me about that, the audience for an album like this is probably quite low and I would be surprised if Rainer manages to sell half of the 500 artbook CD-albums that he has created for this release. It should be if someone gets it for the photographs because those are very good, but ballet and extreme metal isn’t really a good or logical combination.

If you like vocal grotesquery, strange screams and that sort of thing, it could be an album you should have a closer look at. If you generally aren’t into that kind of stuff this will not change your opinion, for most of us it is an album we can do very well without.

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