Lund: A southern Swedish city incubating in the shadows of the monolithic Lund University, and that from time to time implode into a pseudo-intellectual melting pot. Sometimes, entities make their way out of this porridge. Sometimes they’re drawn back into it before you even had time to blink. Sometimes they stay. FORLORN REMEMBRANCE is a demo-band who’s most likely fits in to the last generalization, since they now release their second demo baptized to Chronicles From Bygone Eras; a three song long story that will take up 32 min and 21 s of your life. It starts off a bit promising with the first creation Post-Human Tranquility having subtle synthesizers and soothing guitar picking, growling vocals and all the other things that comes with the progressive metal-territory. However, the red alert-system goes of when the same loop is repeated over, and over, and over again. There’s a quite pleasant flow in it though, although it’s a bit too anonymous. Perhaps it is just a matter of being picky but it would be nice with something extra; something unexpected that makes the song and the band stand out and make you feel moved. It is not hard to deduce that someone, or everyone have been subjected do a couple OPETH overdoses now and then, which may be a good thing if you know how to take in influences and in an eclectical way make them your own thing. Or it can be a bad situation where you become a self-distance-less junkie who in a slave-like manner follow the frameworks of other people without questioning. With that said, FORLORN REMEMBRANCE have the potential to end up in either of these extremes, and it all depends on their own future evolution. The members of the band know the basics when it comes to handling their instruments but the clean vocals are not good at all as they wiggle in and out of tune in just about every section, and unless you prefer your English with a Swenglish sounding twist the pronunciation doesn’t help either. In addition, the vocals are not very well mixed in with the rest of the music. The music would be quite alright if FORLORN REMEMBRANCE would just get this under control. There are pleasant guitar melodies, such as the initial riff in Autumns Mourning, and the song itself is rather good but – again – the clean vocals comes in and brings it all down, like a gust taking down a house of cards. Unfortunately the same goes for …And The World Lies Silent, (that also includes a H.P. Lovecraft-flirt in the lyrics). Overall, the sound is slightly bleak and the arrangement is a bit messy, when acoustic guitars jump in out of nowhere, synthesizers suddenly starts to sound before they just as suddenly as they came go away. I’m assuming that the songs and the band would make a different impression if experienced live. The creation of progressive music is an art; not just being able to cut and paste of various passages, loops et cetera that sounds good when played separately. And as mentioned, FORLORN REMEMBRANCE might actually become such artists, but they’re not there just yet.
-Septikemi
VITALS:
Release: 2011
Label: Self-distributed Demo
Avantgenre: Progressive Semi-experimental Metal
Duration: 32:21
Origin: Sweden
Official site: http://www.myspace.com/forlornremembrance
Review online since: 24.05.2011 / 17:45:40
TRACKLIST:
01 – Post-Human Tranquillity
02 – Autumns Mourning
03 – …And The World Lies Silent
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