Review Summary: Accessible, atmospheric doom metal for sleepyheads.
Lethian Dreams is a doom metal band. They also borrow ideas from ambient loving post-rock bands in general (especially in the song And Hollow). The majority of the album sounds like the slower cuts from Draconian’s album, Sovran. Naturally, this type of music is quite repetitive. The guitar patterns can especially get played out, but the music itself doesn’t suffer that much. A nice atmosphere is created from the vocals that mix smoothly into guitar parts, sounding like the spacey guitars themselves. The album is a bit slow and meandering, but this is doom metal after all. You Say cuts up the repetition a bit with some fetching acoustics, but mostly you get an album that sticks to its established atmosphere.
Whatever you compare this album to doesn’t matter. It’s a collection of atmospheric metal tracks. A pleasant experience is guaranteed, with very soft vocals. The female vocals here bear some similarity to Sarah McLachlan and Heike Langhans, tethering this very floaty album together into harmony. Not much stands out as a bad songwriting choice (except Tidal is overly long, over eleven minutes). Actually, nothing stands out in general. The songs bleed into each other and the vocals bleed into the music, and the result is an album that smoothly enters in and out of memory. Whether the smooth melodies wash over you mostly depends on your mood. I recommend A Shadow of Memories as accompaniment for a sleepy, rainy day.
