Autumn (NLD)
Altitude

2.5
average

Review

by Trey STAFF
March 2nd, 2009 | 28 replies

Release Date: 2009 | Tracklist

Review Summary: Everything you’d expect from a completely average gothic rock band with female vocals.

Every genre eventually becomes saturated by bands without any identity of their own. It just seems to be the nature of the business to try to emulate the band that is drawing the most attention. While this problem is an annoyance within most genres, it is a complete disaster within the confines of female-fronted gothic rock. In a broad sense, gothic rock bands with female vocalists can easily be stereotyped. There are the bands trying to emulate Evanescence, the bands trying to emulate Nightwish and the bands trying to emulate Theatre of Tragedy. What seems to make the rampant lack of originality even worse within this genre is that the level of musicianship is often horribly low. This lack of originality combined with sub-par playing should be destroying the genre, but it’s not. It’s not destroying the genre because fans seem to eat up whatever is released regardless of originality, quality or any other factor that affects every other genre. I can only assume that it’s this fact that allows a band like Autumn to have a record deal at all.

As I said earlier, almost every band in this genre is “influenced” by one of three other groups; Autumn’s influence is Evanescence with an 80s-rock leaning. The bands trying to emulate that particular sound tend to have songs that are full of unobtrusive, generic riffs that deliver very little in the way of power or memorable moments, and that’s what we have here. It is near-impossible to hear a riff and know what song it went to because they all sound so alike and indistinct. Their placement near the bottom of the mix only serves to enhance this problem and it relegates them to nothing more than a foundation over which to layer the vocals and keyboards. This really isn’t anything new for the genre, though, as the riffs often suck and end up down in the mix which leaves the abundance of keyboards to hide the shortcomings; this didn’t happen here.

The keyboard melodies are developed just enough to not be annoying, but they’re also as generic and forgettable as the riffs. The band doesn’t seem to make any attempt at pushing beyond the synth’s standard sound and are content to simply create a melody and run it into the ground. There are bands that get away with barely passable music because their vocalist is outstanding, but Autumn doesn’t deliver on that front either. While the vocals themselves are perfectly listenable, the vocal arrangements and especially the choruses just fail to elicit any excitement. Her voice seems limited to a very specific range, and whether that was by design or necessity, it doesn’t help the songs at all. Her vocals just become another element that sounds the same on every song and adds to the repetitive feeling that steadily builds as the album progresses.

What can really be said about an album that is so completely average? The problem lies in the fact that once it is over there is nothing that is going to stick out as being completely terrible but there’s also nothing that is going to make you want to listen to it again. It is this complete lack of positives and negatives that makes it hard to simply dismiss the album, but it also makes it very easy to not actively recommend it to anyone. Let me put it this way, this is the stereotypical female-fronted gothic rock album. From its generic riffs to its reliance on keyboards and their vocalist to create some kind of quality; it is everything one would expect from a run-of-the-mill band. If you just can’t get enough of this style of music than there might be enough redeeming factors to warrant giving this a listen, but for anyone else it is easily passable.

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3.7
great

Rank: #0 for 2009

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Autumn (NLD) Altitude

Review

Autumn (NLD)
Altitude