Melody? Check! Darkness? Check! Good mix? Sometimes.
Berlin’s Pyre of Descent is a good example that sometimes a band has to wait for the right moment to arrive. In existence for ten years, the one-man-project needed eight years to really publish anything (at least on Bandcamp) and that can be a good or a bad sign. With this melodic doom metal act from Germany’s capital it’s somewhere in the middle. One might argue that it needed so much time to really find the right sound, another might say that it shows a lack of concentration.
When listening to this four-track mini-album one can say the same, if you wait long enough – especially for the last two tracks – you can hear some beautiful moments, where everything falls nicely into place, the gloomy arpeggios and the crawling drums that all in all then form a wonderfully dark, melancholic, doubt-stricken realm in which the only light out doesn’t necessarily come from above, but rather from below. Especially the third track shows the ability to throw not everything into the frying pan of despair but rather to wait for the right moment for each instrument, each vocal and each single element in order to not have one awful concoction of indistinguishable origin but rather a tasty recipe that you want t have over and over again.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the first two songs which are not utter rubbish but which do not pull the listener in like the second half. They show a medicine man performing the same ritual for the umpteenth time so that he himself doesn’t even care anymore (which does not mean that the songwriter didn’t care, he just didn’t develop the songs as well as number three and four). He is dancing around the fire always glancing away from the sparkling embers looking towards the mountains in front of the starlit sky where he will find later meet his true calling.
