Barren Earth - Curse of the Red River (2010)^{Release ID: 8248}

This is far too girly for me. It's well performed & produced but failed to capture me emotionally. The Amorphis influence is obvious as well as classic heavy metal & elements of stadium rock. The songs are generally structured well & the heavy sections blend nicely with the clean sections. The death vocals are pretty average & the clean vocal parts of truly cringe-worthy. The cleaner parts of the music are overly melancholic & come across as very cheesy. Forgive me but I'm from the old-school who believes that death metal should be dark & I find even the heavy sections to be too anthemic for my taste. Someone please ban Dream Theater-style keyboard solos in death metal too!!