On review here is De Profundis, the full-length debut by the seven-piece French band Les Enfants de DAGON. This is an album that incorporates a lot of different genres – gothic, doom, melodic death, black, with the primary I would say being gothic.
Likes:
Musically proficient. Varied song structures and the production for the most part is good. I quite enjoy the fact that each song has a different mood and tone-setting intro, almost quite theatrical in a musical sense. The operatic vocals are very good, there is however a ‘but’…
Dislikes:
Firstly and just a small niggle for me is the lack of definition on the bass drum/s. It sounds good when double bass is not being used, however, throw in those double kicks and you begin to lose the clean bass kick sound, especially when the vocals are happening. Anyway, that’s just a small and fairly trivial thing.
My main issue is too many vocal styles overpowering the music. Opera, death growl, black metal, spoken… it’s too much and a vocal overload. Not to mention the fact that the death growl is not great. Operatic vocals, unless you’re Messiah Marcolin, are very hard to digest in large quantities, and I find there is a lot of it on this album. Vocals make or break you, so a lot of thought needs to be put into where, when and how they are used. I also get the sense that the band began to run out of ideas in the second half of the album, or perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps by this stage I had had enough of all the vocals. It’s probably the latter.
A conclusive overview:
A good theatrical production for what this album is. Musically it’s good but you need to listen carefully because it’s a vocal overload which is a shame as I think it could’ve been a better album. The potential is there. It’s a debut from a band that does show promise.
Is it still worth a listen? I will always advocate that you listen to the album and especially if you enjoy gothic metal, which I would say is probably the primary genre here. Would I listen to it again? No.
Til next time.
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