Review Summary: Swedens industrial metallers prove that they are able to make multiple good albums
Deathstars is an industrial gothic metal band from Sweden. They themselves describe their style as deathglam because of the glam influences, their so called death-style-looks and depressive melodies. Night Electric Night is their third full album and it more or less continues in the vein of their previous album Termination Bliss.
Termination Bliss, which was released in 2006, was a very interesting industrial album, mixing the elements of industrial metal, gothic metal and glam rock. Thanks to that album, Deathstars quickly became one of Scandinavia's and Europe's most recognized and loved metal bands with great live shows and a unique look. 3 years later they are back with their new album titled Night Electric Night.
Like said above, Night Electric Night is stylistically more or less like Termination Bliss. It has all the Deathstars trademarks like the deep, powerful and demonic voice of the vocalist Whiplasher Bernadotte, the depressing guitar melodies and the dark, sick synths. The lyrical content has also remained the same, most of the lyrics are dark, violent, evil and sometimes even post-satanic. Combine these lyrics with the demonic and evil voice of the vocalist and you will have a chilling vocal experience in almost every song. This album does have some minor changes from Termination Bliss though and sadly most of them are for the worst. First of all, a big bunch of the songs are a bit too much alike, and so the middle section of this album is a bit boring. Tracks 5-8 could have easily been combined into a one big song. Instead, we now got 4 songs that all sound almost exactly the same, the only differences between the songs being minor buildup disparities.
The other flaw that this album has is quite evident. It is very hard, if not impossible to make the same good album twice. Deathstars actually almost managed to cope with that so props for them, but this album is still too much alike with Termination Bliss. Shortly speaking, this is a good kind of a clone album. This has got good music on it, it's just that there is the feeling you have heard it all before on Termination Bliss. The dark synths, intimidating vocals, depressing guitar melodies and drumming patterns are all very, very similar to those found on Termination Bliss.
But these two flaws don't affect the overall musical quality too much. If you are a fan of industrial and/or gothic metal than this album still has a sufficient amount of twists and turns to keep things interesting, especially if you have not heard Termination Bliss. The qualities of this band outnumber the flaws and if to exclude Deathstars' other albums than this is still quite an original album compared to many other gothic or industrial albums out there.
Recommended tracks:
"Night Electric Night"
"Death Dies Hard"
"Venus In Arms"
"Chertograd"
"Opium"
