Review Summary: Clean vocals and some more melodic elements has given Forgotten Tomb's new album a character of its own. A good place to start if you want to get into the band's depressive ''suicidal'' black/doom.
Forgotten Tomb – A black metal band with doom metal as metal platform. They have come from Italy and they have become a pretty well-established metal band in the underground metal scene over the years. The most interesting thing about
Forgotten Tomb is their ability to create music that actually touches your inner emotiones. This is not a technically gifted band but they can create strong music with simple techniques and vocals. Another interesting thing about this band is their development between albums. Lets take a look at their first album
Songs To Leave. That album is probably the most unique album, it displays anxiety, hoplessness and sorrow in a perfect way with
Herr Morbid’s throat slitting screams and wails.
Springtime Depression had a more solid musical sound and it had also the best vocals when it comes to black metal vocal work. That album was very very dark, creepy and more unpleasent than the first album.
Love’s Burialground was pretty much the same thing except that the album had more songs compared to the rest of the albums. And in 2007 they released a new album called
Negative Megalomania, and that is the album that you will be reading about now.
Negative Megalomania, 2007
Strengths – I knew that this band tends to change their music when they release a new record so I could never imagine how this was going to sound like. As usual, the band still possesses the ability to create unpleasent black/doom by just using simplistic music. The melodies in this album is definitley a plus because they give the tracks lots of catchy hooks and a great atmosphere. You will encounter sad and depressive melodies that will haunt you like a ghost in an abandon house. Electro acoustics and a varied lead guitar create a good atmosphere and character to the tracks which lowers the repetitive factors. A secong thing that has changed is the vocals work. From screams to blackish shrieks you have now semi-death grunts which still sounds familiar to black metal vocalists. The overall song material follows the same track but in different trains so to say. Some of the best ‘’pure’’ black/doom tracks from this ablum would be
A Dish Best Served Cold and
Blood And Concrete. Those tracks have the best of all elements, eerie and unpleasent atmospheres, ordinary black metal vocals (most of the time) and haunting melodies. But there is more, clean vocals are now being used. This new vocal addition will definitley attracted more people plus that it gives the material a whole new look.
Weaknesses – This album does not have that much negative stuff, there are only two, perhaps three things that didn’t worked for me this time. The first thing I would like to point out is the new type of vocals. The band just lost 50% of their creepy and unpleasent vibe just because of these new vocals. Their suicidal black/doom sounds more like some dumb emo bull**** when the clean singing takes place. It actually sounds like
Gene Simmons (from
KISS), and vocals like that sounds pretty stupid in this kind of music.
No Rehab (Final Exit) and
The Scapegoat are two examples of songs that has clean vocals, the tracks overall are very good but without the clean singing they would’ve been better. The second thing that I thought was bad, but only slightly bad were some of the melodies. They still manage to maintain a certian level of creepiness with their melodies but now there are a little too many melodies. If you compare this album to the other albums you will notice a pretty well balanced mix of melodies and black metal elements (musicwise). The melodies actually reduce pretty much of the black metal elements, but not much though.
Not a bad record at all, this is actually really good but because of the clean singing the rating will be lowered, drastically. I would say that this band is pretty unique, they don’t use the same type of sound but they don’t change it too much either. You can hear that it is black/doom all the time except that there are some changes and fixes throughout their material. I highly recommend people who are into black metal of all different types to check out this band. It might not be your black metal dream band but you will definitely get a new black metal experience if you decide to listen to this band.
Negative Megalomania would be a good gateway for those who want get into the band’s music, but if you want a real
Forgotten Tomb experience I highly recommend their second album
Springtime Depression. If you people like black metal with Satanist lyric themes and stuff like that then you should handle a band that sings about suicide and stuff like that. Remember, there is music out there that is much worse than this in terms of lyric messages.
Recommended Tracks
-- A Dish Best Served Cold
-- Negative Megalomania
-- Blood And Concrete
3.5/5
, feel free to go even further when it comes to emotion and inferring. Good analysis on the whole :thumb: I actually liked the first track, but it goes downhill from there.This Message Edited On 05.27.07
