Crematory: Believe (2000)

A couple of months ago, Crematory made big news (well, in the field of metal news anyway which is to say not much notice anywhere else) when drummer Markus Jüllich delivered an epic rant about revenue as a metal band.  Specifically, he was pissed about a lack of pre-sales for the band's tour, which is an odd thing to be pissed about.  He said the band would cancel the tour if sales did not improve.  He also complained about downloading and streaming and begged fans to buy the CD and the vinyl of the new album.  And then he topped it off by calling the fans lazy.  Now I don't want to spend a lot of time dealing with this stuff, I do believe in supporting bands by buying physical copies of albums (or at least paying for downloads, though to a lesser extent), and I certainly enjoy going to concerts and buying merch.  The rant did capture my attention though and I decided to check them out.

This is the band's 2000 album, during which time they were more of a gothic metal band, as opposed to their earlier gothic/death metal and their latter industrial gothic metal.  It is one of the higher-rated albums on the Metal Archives, which is why I decided to check it out instead of some of their other material.  It was basically between it and the band's debut album, which was much harder to find at a decent price.

And how is it?  Well, it's not great.  Maybe it is the fact that I have outgrown this style of music a long time ago.  Maybe it really is just kind of bland.  There is really nothing inherently wrong with gothic metal.  Some bands do it quite well.  Moonspell is incredible on just about everything.  Cradle of Filth is a much more extreme gothic metal band but I am a huge fan of them.  And there are groups like Tristania and others.  I still like a lot of those bands, even though I do not listen to much gothic metal anymore.  So gothic metal is not a deal-breaker for me. 

This though just does not really do it for me.  It reminds me most of middle-era Lacuna Coil just before the group really changed their sound to more gothic rock and with death growls replacing the sultry vocals of Cristina Scabbia.  It is clearly metal based on the riffs, but none of the songs really do all that much, and some are positively cringe-worthy ("Act Seven").  Most of the songs simply do not build to anything interesting and stay at one tempo, without much variety.  That is kind of a problem over all with the album.  There are a couple of slower songs, but those are just kind of awful, as opposed to the just boring remainder of the album.  And the vocals on those slower songs resemble those of Tiamat after they started to suck. 

I do not hate this album, I just find it kind of bland.  There is nothing really wrong with most of it, it just does not capture my attention much.  19-year-old me probably would have loved it, but now it simply does not do much for me.  I would not mind hearing it once in awhile and I do not regret buying it, I just do not think I will listen to it often.