3rd and the Mortal, The - Tears Laid in Earth (1994)^{Release ID: 4439}

I''m not going to sugar coat it. I absolutely hate this. This is another one of those female-fronted bands that coasts off "we have a pretty operatic-soprano" singer. Like all the other stuff like this, you have a mediocre metal band backing a front woman who would clearly rather be doing anything else. If you would like Nightwish but slower here ya go. Personally, I'd banish this stuff from the face of the earth if I could. The appropriate subgenre is "metal for people who don't actually like metal, performed by people who probably don't actually like metal." Did I mention that I don't like it very much?

My Fallen clan challenge starts to take me to come very different waters as I get into the final third.  Having been a largely positive experience thus far, there has been some genuinely unexpected discoveries along the way.  The 3rd and Mortal however present a very different experience, one that has its high points as well as its lows it has to be said.  Considering what I normally listen to from the country of Norway, these guys are a few football fields away from my usual black metal fodder that I consume with the vigour of a rabid animal.  When I got Tears Laid in Earth between my teeth however I instantly started pulling the face of a confused dog, tilting my head from side to side like I could not believe what I was hearing.

First of all, I cannot ignore how good a vocalist Kirsti Huke is.  Although she is entirely the wrong fit for this band and indeed this genre, she has a beautiful and shrill vocal style that when considered in isolation is undeniably good.  The challenge is that the rest of the band/the music just cannot fit around her.  Listen to this album and what you will hear is the instrumentation doing its upmost to play some doom, using keyboards, pianos and atmospherics alongside the guitars and drums to create some haunting (although never oppressive) music.  Meanwhile, whenever Kirsti sings, everything else takes a back seat.  The structures to tracks become so predictable, so quickly that I soon start to lose interest.  Indeed, the only thing that keeps me present with the album are the two instrumental tracks in the middle of the album (arguably the high point of the record for me) where Kirsti does not sing but cries out alongside the instrumentation instead - more evidence that the two do not fit together well at all.

Trond and Geir are perfectly competent guitarists, that much is obvious here.  However, they clearly want to play doom metal - not some ethereal gothic metal - and as a result the album feels constantly short-changed by these opposing elements.  Forget you are listening to a doom record and the album is not half-bad but I am on the Fallen clan challenge, not some easy-listening playlist challenge.