RAPTURE
Songs For The Withering
(Spikefarm Records)
45:37min

This 9-tracker is already the second full length effort of Finish Doom rockers of sweet melancholy. Unfortunately this is my first experience in listening, even though I tried hard to get ahold of their debut album “Futile”. Hence I cannot compare both their albums with each other. Anyway, if you are into KATATONIA’s “Brave Murder Day” or October TIDE’s “Rain Without End” this should be some fresh food for your melancholy-longing soul. Wrapped into a real bulldozer of a sound production RAPTURE’s compositions enchant with sad, tender cobweb alike melodies. The neverending drive of the rhythm section and the powerful vocals, which sound somehow like a darker kind of Jonas Renke’s ones, give the right heaviness to the songs. Exception: the third song ‘Two Dead Names’ is a bit calmer and comes across with completely clean but well fitting vocals. This song alone would perfectly fit into the amount of all the heavier ones. But RAPTURE have decided to come up with two more “calm” compositions. Although clean vocals are partly used throughout most of the heavier songs too, ‘The Vast’ (5:06) and ‘The Grat Distance’ (4:10) contain clean vocals all the way through. In case of the latter I do not think they fit too well. They sound rather strange, if not wrong to my ears. But not just only the vocals, these two songs are stucture – and melodiewise to soft, if not to say poppy for my taste. In course of time you get used to it, but I nevertheless prever the heavier ones instead. Fortunately the songs surrounding the “softies” are strong enough to capture objections. So for this time RAPTURE get just the yellow card. But if they “develop” more into the softer direction on their next output they will get the red one for sure. In this case RAPTURE should be very careful not to suffer the same destiny as KATATONIA do today: insignificance. To sum it up: if you are into the records aforementioned give RAPTURE a try. I like this album in the end (especially in these rainy days) and so should you…

Thomas Georg

Thomas Georg

Related reviews / interviews:
RAPTURE - Malevolent Demise Incarnation (Thomas Meyer)
RAPTURE - Paroxysm Of Hatred (Julián “Taken By Apathy” Núñez)
RAPTURE - Interview (Frank Stöver)

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