28 March 2024

Aeternitas – House of Usher

[schema type=”review” name=”Aeternitas – House of Usher” description=”Label: Massacre Records” author=”Juho Karila” pubdate=”2016-10-21″ ]

When a German band releases an album full of symphonic metal, what could possibly go wrong? Aeternitas is here to reply with their 4th studio album with the power of their 7 strong group.

The band was founded in 1999 and they’ve kept it quite busy with 4 albums and a live DVD so I’m quite surprised that the answer is almost everything.

The intro track, Le Coeur, promises much and sounds like a soundtrack to a movie but when the title track, House of Usher rolls in, it feels like a cold and wet towel against the face. The song is slow, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the arrangements are bad, feeling out of place and just sounding amateurish.

Not to mention the singing. Both singers feels like they’re trying to do something without properly mastering their technique. Alma Mathar the lead singer has a poppish rasp in her voice, yet she tries to sing like a classical singer, causing her voice breaking from time to time and being painful to listen to. And this was only the first song… Sigh.

The Prophecy is a bit better, it doesn’t try to be complex and relies heavily on the singers, with orchestrations and everything else being on the background but it only underlines the fail of post processing the album.

With Roderick the singing duty has been completely left to Oliver Bandmann who is the stronger and better of the band and the track sounds pretty decent for a generic pop song by being upbeat, compared to the previous ones, but still falling into mid-tempo. Maybe they should try changing the singers or focus on easy pop, which seems to be strenght of the band. Followed by a poppish ballad, Madeleine introduces the frailness of Mathar’s voice. While she sounds better without a sound wall of distorted guitars behind her, I can’t get past how she sounds like she was meant to sing in a completely different kind of group.

The song also contains the first guitar solo of the album, which doesn’t really help shaking off the amateur feeling of the band. A solo doesn’t have to be fast or technical but then it needs musicality in it, which the string section Daniel T. Lentz and Alexander Hunzinger fails to deliver us.

Best track is the fastest one of the album and it’s called Fear. It stands out by being clearly more intense and aggressive than the rest, which redeems some of the expectations set by the intro but you just can’t turn crap into diamonds.

The tracks worth listening to stops here and the rest of the album really revolves around the aforementioned facts, making me wonder if this was actually a demo? At least it should had been. I’m not sure if I can recommend this album to anyone but starting bands as a warning example. This is not how you make your band getting success. 57:20 minutes is a way to long album for a band with very little, if anything, to offer.

Line-up:
Alma Mathar – Vocals
Oliver Bandmann – Vocals
Alexander Hunzinger – Guitar, Backing Vocals
Anja Hunzinger – Keyboards
Daniel T. Lentz – Lead Guitar
Stefan Baltzer – Bass
Frank Mölk – Drums

Tracklist:
1. Le Coeur
2. House Of Usher
3. The Prophecy
4. Roderick
5. Madeline
6. Fear
7. Forbidden Love
8. The Haunted Palace
9. Tears
10. Buried Alive
11. Can You Hear The Demons
12. The Fall
13. Falling Star
14. Open Your Eyes
15. Ethelred

Links:
Facebook
Official