Faal - Desolate Grief - Tempelores Magazine

[schema type=”review” name=”FAAL – Desolate Grief” description=”Label: Ván Records ” author=”Basak Günel” pubdate=”2018-01-26″ ]

Faal is a Dutch doom/death metal band. Formed in 2005, the band’s music deals with dark concepts like death and depression. As a matter of fact, the name Faal means ‘failure’ in Dutch, as in ‘failing in life’. They have released three full-length albums so far with the latest one “Desolate Grief” being released this week.

The album delivers us 5 songs with a beautiful instrumental intro as the first opening piece. As with the typical doom records, each song is quite long and generally delivers us the doom metal sound we are used to. The general tempo of the album is quite slow but the rhythm changes throughout each song,. The concepts of the band are depicted quite well in the melodies and the vocals so this record will definitely go well in these dark winter nights. Technically, even though synths are part of the band’s structure, I think that they concentrated more on the guitars & vocals so the synths were left out. That’s a shame because a little bit of atmosphere and synths would have added another dimension to the record.

Although the album offers us some fine doom metal, I gotta say I couldn’t get into it that much. My opinion is that it’s not very unique (which is quite important when one composes long songs…) and the atmosphere lacked in the overall album. But hey, not all doom records have to be atmospheric so I think that this album could be more appealing to the listener who likes doom metal straight to the point and without atmosphere. Although it doesn’t bring anything new to the scene, those who like the absolute darkness and the depressive concepts in doom metal might give it a try.

Line-up:
William Nijhof – vocals
Gerben van der Aa – guitars
Pascal Vervest – guitars
Remco Verhees – drums
Vic van der Steen – bass
Cátia Uiterwijk Winkel-André Almeida – synths