By: Anders

Posted: Oct 4, 2005

My first encounter with this Swedish band was with the material on their second album "Grimjaur" I think, or perhaps the debut "Loreia", no matter which of the 2 it was, the music didn't catch on to me, and I luckily forgot about the band's existence, until quite some years later, when their new effort "Darker Designs & Images" ended up in my CD player.

I remembered the band as a symphonic black metal band using a big amount of female vocals. That has for such changed a bit, they still have symphonic elements and big keyboard spheres, and the main vocals do get backed up by female vocals once in a while. The music is for the most of time dark and heavy, mid-tempo, moving forward in a nice and crushing pace, with a few pace shifts now and then. The main riffs aren't that exciting, the do their job and moves the music ahead, together with the pounding double bass drumming. There are some nice melodic guitar leads now and then, but nothing out of the ordinary. The keys there are used are for such okay, and adds some bombastic and at times epic atmosphere to the music. The female vocals used are quite okay, they add a bit of mystery and a nice cold gothic feeling to the overall dark atmosphere. The main vocal which is a slow and well pronounced male growl is good and carries the material a long way, there isn't that much variation of the vocal, but it is backed well up by the female vocals and a growled choir once in a while.

The production of the album is dark and pretty stripped down, it's the pure music flowing through the speakers. Due to that the sound seems a bit thin at times, but that keeps a raw edge to the tracks. Though a bit more sheer power behind the instruments, wouldn't have been bad in my eyes.

This is an okay album, not groundbreaking or too exiting, but enjoyable once in a while. A nice dark release placed somewhere in between of death, gothic, doom and black metal, without getting too aggressive at any point. The atmosphere is kept dark and pretty doomy throughout the 11 songs. I could have used some more tracks in Swedish though, there are only one entitled 'Skuggar', and the pronunciation of the lyrics in that exact track is killer, due to the slow growl, it sounds really good and adds an extra dimension, too bad Siebenbürgen didn't use that effect more, as they did on their earlier albums.

Rating: 7/10

Siebenbürgen website

Distributed in Denmark and kindly supplied by Target

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