There's a chain of regional music stores close to me, and for years and years, nearly every location I went to had several copies (both new ones for consignment and used) of this disc (as of this writing, some still do!). I always passed because they never seemed to go under $5, and I wasn't really interested in a disc that looked to me like unspectacular gothic metal. I found one in the bargain bin of a totally different store, and well, here we are.
This isn't quite as spastic-sounding and incoherent as many kitchen sink bands, but there are a lot of subgenres and influences mixed here, seldom yielding decent results. It's not terribly hard to pick okay-ish parts or interesting ideas, but as a whole it comes off as being below average. The majority of the music is a mix of gothic metal, doom, and some black metal, along with some other influences. There are some faster brutal passages which I think were meant to be death metal inspired, but many of these sound muddy with the guitars pushed under the drums and keyboards, so they don't really come off as such. I was also unpleasantly shocked to hear bouncy groove metal style riffs in several places, like the opening track and "Hands on Thorns." The main vocals are BM style, very obviously female, and seem overly forced, perhaps like a slightly worse version of Onielar from DNS. Despite me not being a big fan, they're still better than the clean "vocals," which are just the frontwoman talk-singing unethusiastically.
Listening to this just makes me wish the band had gone full-on into gothic or atmospheric doom such as mid-era My Dying Bride--the doomy songs ("Beauty is the Beast" and "Cold, Dark, Empty") come off stronger, and the violin and keyboard work is probably the band's most interesting aspect musically.
