Trail of Tears - Free Fall Into Fear (2005)^{Release ID: 9735}

There comes a time when a band would make severe changes to their own sound, and not often can they still sound good. For this band Trail of Tears, all they did was replace female clean vocals with male ones, drop the tuning 3 semitones lower, and added more deathly riffs to the mix. So different yet darker and heavier! And those changes came to fruition after Cathrine Paulsen temporarily left the band and session vocalist Kjetil Nordhus (Green Carnation) joined full-time.

Kjetil and unclean vocalist Ronny Thorsen transformed this band from Beauty and the Beast gothic metal to Devil and Angel melodeath, more specifically, symphonic extreme gothic melodeath. Free Fall Into Fear is more aggressive than the band's surrounding works while having lots of variation.

Starting things off with perhaps the best track here, the fantastic "Joyless Trance of Winter" is a prime example of symphonic gothic melodeath with groove-ish riffing and a beautiful clean chorus. The melodic "Carrier of the Scars of Life" sounds almost like Nightrage's debut Sweet Vengeance, particularly one of the songs where that band has Evergrey's Tom S. Englund performing cleans. "Frail Expectations" has more of a gothic atmosphere while sounding eerily close to Wintersun's "Time" epic.

Then we have the power metal-ish melodeath fury of "Cold Hand of Retribution", not too far off from Into Eternity. It's also the only song in the entire album to have female vocals, sung by guest vocalist Astri Skarpengland. The menacing keyboards shine in "Watch Your Fall" while the guitar duo pull off crushing work and the cleans and growls continue their battle. We also have the technical "The Architect of My Downfall" which practically brings back Soilwork's melodeath fire that they dropped most of in their own album Stabbing the Drama that year. Doom-filled "Drink Away the Demons" is a little slower than the rest.

"Point Zero" has a heavy breakdown with some interesting keyboard surprises. That also occurs in "Dry Well of Life", a highlight of melodeath rage. With all those amazing songs, is there one track that can be a slight downer? That would have to be the closing track "The Face of Jealousy". I mean it has great energy, but it doesn't stand out as much as the others. Still a satisfying album ending all the same.

Trail of Tears has once again proven to be masters of symphonic extreme gothic melodeath, even with a different sound. It doesn't please a lot of metalheads, but it really should. This is the kind of dark work that deserves more appreciation!

Favorites: "Joyless Trance of Winter", "Carrier of the Scars of Life", "Cold Hand of Retribution", "The Architect of My Downfall", "Dry Well of Life"