Catamenia
The Rewritten Chapters

Finnish wolf friends Catamenia are taking a trip down memory lane and rewriting some of the defining chapters of the band’s rather long story. These rewritten chapters comes after a major reshuffle of members in this band and is a compilation of sorts, it is new recordings of songs already released on their earlier albums. This might be a good thing with a new band as this is with only Riku remaining from the album prior to this one, that album was called Cavalcade and from that we have the title track amongst the fifteen tracks that makes up this album. Also amongst these tracks is a bit of surprise in a Bon Jovi cover made of course in the Catamenia style which is a brand of melodic black metal.

I was impressed by Cavalcade two years ago which had a good melodic touch but also of extreme metal a bit different from what is usually heard from their countrymen in the elite force of the finnish melodic extreme metal. Something that has changed for this album, this album has a grander sound and it is as Massacre state in the press info, much heavier than the album before it and definitely better produced than its predecessor. It all sounds more expensive and professional than anything I have heard by Catamenia before but if we compare it to Cavalcade we also notice that in making a richer fuller sound they also seems to have forgotten about the good thing of varying their songs, this album is significantly less dynamic than its predecessor. The lack of dynamics does not only show in the songs but also in the vocals which were quite dynamic between clean and growling but for this album it is mostly growling and in the end the album can feel a bit monotone considering the fact that it is more than an hour long.

I think that the latest Sonata Arctica album and this one is quite similar, they do everything as they have done but there is something amiss compared to what they have done before and like that album it feels more like a commercial product than something done from a creative standpoint. Perhaps it is all those excellent sales numbers talked about in the press information that has gotten to their heads, I don’t know but I do know that I liked Cavalcade much more than this one and this one is better done for the most part but maybe in the more expensive production they forgot about that x-factor or soul that makes good music great.

Considering what they came from this album feels as a disappointment as it just is nowhere near as good as Cavalcade and I think the title song from that album illustrates that point rather well. It may sound better at first glance but it has none of the dynamics and the great vocal works of the original song is left and left is a heavier, faster and more boring version of it. If this is the case of all the songs is impossible for me to tell as I have not heard them all in original version but as far as I can tell from what I have heard in original, the songs are considerable less dynamic but sounds more expensive. I think though that even if songs might be a bit less good than original versions, this album could have been very good if it had been more varied which unfortunately it is not and that makes this album feel rather average I would say. That is disappointing.

I think that if you are a big fan of Catamenia you will probably very much enjoy this album as it is not only new versions of old songs, it is a trip down memory lane. But I do believe that if you are just a peripheral listener of the melodic extreme metal you will go better with something from Children of Bodom or Insomnium as this is similar to those but less interesting and if you want it slightly different from those I think looking back through the Catamenia catalogue would be wiser. In the end I would say that this is a rather average album, really well produced but not that interesting compared to what has come from this band before it.