Forgotten Tomb: Hurt Yourself and the Ones You Love (2015)

That is quite the emo-sounding title, but that is something that not really unusual for Forgotten Tomb.  The band is one of those who I checked out a long time ago when I was living alone but had kind of forgotten about.  I liked the band, and their take on blackened was certainly unique.  But as I became busy with other things, I was not able to keep up with each and every band anymore.  That changed recently when I picked this one up along with a number of other releases.  This was not the primary target, but I decided to check the band out once again.

Forgotten Tomb is an Italian band that now combines black metal, doom metal and gothic metal into an unholy concoction that is as likely to depress the listener as it is to be blasphemous.  Their sound does appear to have evolved over the last several years since their previous release that I have heard.  For one thing, they have tightened up the songs considerably.  That album, Negative Megalomania, had just five songs and all but one were considerably longer than ten minutes in length.  Not one of these songs makes it to that length.  The songs here are much more straightforward without as much instrumental meandering.

The music here is probably closer to gothic doom than black metal, the only remaining black metal elements being the harsh, raspy vocals and the occasional tremolo riff.  This is slow-paced, massively heavy metal with a claustrophobic atmosphere.  Even the lighter moments feel suffocating and evil.  The problem is that most of the songs end up going at about the same pace with little differentiation between songs.  The album as a whole tends to drag as a result without anything clearly compelling happening.  The title track is the exception as the keyboard melodies toward the end are terrific and helps build that song into the most memorable on the album.

Forgotten Tomb have evolved in their sound significantly, but I cannot help but feel that they seem to have lost some of what made that previous album so interesting.  At this point, they sound like any number of other bands.  They used to have a unique quality that seems to have either left their sound entirely or become too commonplace in other bands that Forgotten Tomb no longer stands out.  That is a shame.