Review Summary: The Dark Times of Gothic/Symphonic Metal, part 11
That’s it. I’ve found the worst Sirenia album. Whatever excuses, whatever compliments I could give its two predecessors, I can’t give any of them to The Enigma of Life.
The album’s problems are obvious from the beginning, ironically called “The End of it All”. The verses begin with some intensity, but the chorus just falls flat, with Aylin’s voice sounding completely weightless and emotionless. It’s also kind of a weaker version of The Path to Decay. This continues in “All My Dreams”, which has some heavy riff and more energy on the verses, but dials down the intensity on the chorus. “Fallen Angel” sounds very generic and simple, with a chorus that basically rips off the melody from Xandria’s “Now and Forever”. “This Darkness” doesn’t really live up to its title, with its weirdly upbeat industrial intro and the rest of the song that feels like a collage of Sirenia’s usual clichés, including, yes, the same old lyrics about inner turmoil and Aylin’s inability to belt or sing with any passion.
We get more of that in other tracks. “A Seaside Serenade” shows a little more ambition, but it uses the same riffs and melodies as other Sirenia songs, and something about Aylin’s vocals just doesn’t appeal to me and doesn’t work for the song. “The Twilight in Your Eyes” has a similar problem, with an instrumentation that feels borrowed from Sirenia clichés, and Aylin’s vocals sound a little too shaky. Same thing with the nice but not great “Winter Land”, and the melancholic but just short of greatness “This Lonely Lake”. The title track is a sort of long power ballad where she uses some weird nasal that doesn’t sound any better than her usual style. I guess it sounds like I really hate Aylin’s voice, but that’s not really true. She can be a decent singer when she actually tries, but that kind of strained, girlish and high-pitched singing just isn’t working for me.
And so on. I could list every song, because they all fail at something or other. This album has one issue as a whole: the lack of intensity. It all feels like a plastic version of Sirenia, with no emotion, no song that really has any impact on me. And as you can see from my often repeated criticism, this album is so repetitive that everything I complain about for one song, I could say the same thing about many others.
So I guess I must mention the few good things on the album. I don’t really like Aylin’s chorus on “Darkened Days to Come”, but Morten’s deep, gloomy singing on the verses is pretty good, and feels like a breath of fresh air at this point. “Coming Down” uses a similar vocal configuration (there you go again, with the repetition), but has some heavy riff and much-needed intensity. “Fading Stars” has some pretty nice verses, where Aylin sounds better than on most of the album, and an instrumentation that feels like a lost track from “Nine Destinies and a Downfall”.
But I’m just looking for nice things to say. Unfortunately, even the good songs on the album aren’t exactly extraordinary. To add insult to injury, this album is way too long. It has 12 tracks, plus an acoustic version of the title track, and Spanish versions of it and of “This Darkness”, because I really needed to hear these songs in two different languages. At some point, all the songs sound the same anyway, and none of them really impresses me. Sirenia are capable of mediocrity, but even they can’t release something this bad every day. Really, I’m almost impressed by that kind of album where every song is bad or mediocre, and has at least one thing wrong with it. Really, albums in this series are bad for different reasons and at different levels, and this is one of the exceptionally bad ones, a masterpiece of badness.
