Ask yourself a question right now. What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the band name An Autumn for Crippled Children? When I hear that I think of depressing things such as death, despair, hate, misanthropy, and other things of that nature. Well that's exactly what this band An Autumn for Crippled Children display on their debut full-length album,
Lost. The band was formed with three members, MXM on vocals, guitars, and keyboards, TXT on bass, and CXC on drums, only two short years ago in 2008 in The Netherlands and they are still unknown by most people. The band plays in the depressive, atmospheric black metal style mixed with doom elements here and there. While listening to
Lost bands like Leviathan or Alcest may come to mind. One thing's for sure though, if An Autumn for Crippled Children keeps up what they're doing on this album, they'll be a lot more well known around not only Sputnik, but all around the black metal community and the world.
Lost isn't an album that is going to wow you instrumentally. Nothing technical or too intricate going on here. What you do get, however, is plenty of hypnotic riffs and tremolo picked guitars and repetitive fast and slow "black metal" drum styles and also some acoustic guitars thrown in here and there for good measure. The guitars are pretty standard for atmospheric black metal. They're mostly tremolo picked and semi-melodic and usually pretty catchy. They're used to set the atmosphere here, which is very dark, yet also sort of beautiful at the same time. Pretty similar to something you would hear on an Alcest album, which is a good thing. Acoustic guitars show up every once in a while to maintain the "beauty" of the album, while still also retaining that bleak and depressing feeling. Drumming is, once again, very standard for this type of black metal. Usually they're very slow and just keep the beat of the song going. Sometimes you'll see the drumming pick up and do some blast beats, but they usually opt for the slower, doomier style of drumming and it works out very well. There is a very big doom metal influence on this album and it shouldn't go unappreciated. An Autumn for Crippled Children really would rather play a slow and painful brand of black metal than speed everything up. They know how to play fast, which is displayed a little on
Lost, they just choose not to.
Vocals here are very well done. The vocalist, MXM, who also handles guitars and keyboards, is an excellent vocalists as well as musician. The person he can be compared to the most would probably be Wrest from Leviathan. His voice is very distorted and kind of lower in the mix, but you can hear the pain that this man spews from his vocal chords with every word he screams. Every word he says just screams death, despair, and hatred for the world pretty much. Hey it's depressive black metal, what do you expect? Like I said earlier, while this album goes for the more depressing atmosphere, and it definitely does, it also displays a sense of beauty. Those are two styles you wouldn't think would go together very well, but An Autumn for Crippled Children really pull it off and execute that feeling extremely well. With screams of hatred and lyrical themes about depression, anguish, anger, and hatred you wouldn't expect anything beautiful to come out of that whatsoever, but it does and that takes the album to a whole other level.
Basically, if you like depressing things then you'll enjoy this album a lot. An Autumn for Crippled Children really do the whole depressive, suicidal black metal thing very well and they're still a very young band. Remember,
Lost is only their debut album. Like I mentioned earlier, this band is like a mixture between Leviathan and Alcest, so if you're into either of those bands then you really need to hear this album too. They bring the hatred and distorted shrieks of death and destruction of Leviathan, and the beauty and acoustics of Alcest. That's a pretty damn good mixture if you ask me. But hey, you can decide for yourself. Bigger and better things should be expected of this band in the future, so watch out for them. They're definitely a band that will need to be reckoned with in the black metal genre for years to come and they're definitely a bright spot of the modern day black metal scene.
