Review Summary: Just not good enough....
Inconsistency is a problem for a lot of bands. Sometimes they'll drop a great album and follow it with an absolute stinker. It happens to the best of them, honestly. Moonspell is a band that has struggled with this fact throughout their entire career. Starting off as a raw black metal band, they transitioned into a more gothic metal sound while adding influences from industrial rock and some other sounds. Starting with 2006's
Memorial, they started adding that black metal base back into their sound, and ultimately, dropped the best albums of their career. Their darkest material is their best, in my opinion, and sticking with that sound was always the best option for them.
Far from God is an album that sees them go back to a straight-up gothic metal sound and the results, to say the least, are mixed.
This album isn't bad by any means. There are moments of brilliance scattered throughout, but there's also way too many moments of sterile riffs, boring vocals and shallow atmospheres to really grip me in any sort of meaningful way. The black metal influences have all but gone and the result is an album that is, once again, way too inconsistent. Tracks like “Biblical”, “The Great Wolf in the Sky” and “For the Love of Mortals” show off what has always made this band interesting. Slower moments paced by doomy riffs and Fernando's awesome baritone singing voice really shine through on these tracks. However, the rest of the album really doesn't follow suit which is an absolute shame. It's not that anything here is terrible because that's not the case at all, but all too often this album drifts into no-man's land. Directionless would be a word that I would use to describe 75% of
Far from God and that's just not good enough for a band of this magnitude.
Overall,
Far from God is an album that has a few bright spots, but falls short of the bar that Moonspell has set for themselves. Albums like the aforementioned
Memorial and
Night Eternal show off this band in full force. This album, sadly, just never reaches those types of heights in any sort of way. The tracks that I pointed out earlier definitely come close, but ultimately, they're not enough to make
Far from God even the slightest contender in the band's discography. Like I said, inconsistency happens to even the best bands of all-time and I'm hoping that this one is just a small blip on Moonspell's radar and they can come back next time with something a little more ambitious.
