Blood of Indigo
Dawn of the Shaded World

Canadian band Blood of Indigo comes up with their debut album called Dawn of the Shaded World – perhaps a reflection on the world today. It has a cover that is a cool idea but looks somewhat cheap but would still have me check it out if I happened to stumble upon it. They are described as symphonic, gothic, epic, and things like that, and I have been listening to it for quite a while considering the long playing time, and soon you will know some of what I thought.

It is symphonic and gothic, extreme metal, a little like Dimmu Borgir perhaps. The band is clearly inspired by the music of movies and video games as I can hear a lot of things akin to that kind of style. The epic ideas a clearly present all the way through, perhaps most illustrated by the album opening with a fourteen-minute instrumental track. That usage of long passages is a returning thing through the album and over the ten tracks we get about seventy minutes of music that is not so varied as it would have needed to be to sell such a long-playing time.

Long isn’t the same as epic, but some metal bands seem to think it is. I think there are moments and passages that are magical on this album, but there are also those that are unbearable. A fourteen-minute instrumental introduction may seem like a fresh and wild idea, but in reality it turns out to be anything but. You need to be very special to pull off something like that, and Blood of Indigo fails miserably. This opener of course puts a negative spin on the album from the beginning, but it illustrates well how this album tends to turn out. It sets up with very interesting build-ups that eventually leads to nothing – most of the album feels like an anti-climax.

No doubt that there is almost limitless potential within this band, but they need to look at the ideas more rationally and filter somewhat.
“Less is more” is that phrase that is so wise when creating stuff, how often isn’t it true that an album could have been better with less – a more direct approach with far less minutes would have made this better. How about a director’s cut with about thirty minutes removed, I think it would be easy to cut away thirty minutes of this album without doing any damage to any song. Now I just feels like I want to vomit before I get halfway through this one, there is just too much empty space – I have hundreds of albums to review so it is never fun with those that are over an hour long where at least half of it is complete nonsense.

HHHHHHH