This is the eight album from Graveworm, the Italians with a German web address. I became aware of them around 2003 when “Engraved in Black” was released. My recollection is of a purple t-shirt that I still have with a picture of a church yard and a stone cross on it. The Gothic element is there in the music, but the basic formula was and is largely commercial-sounding melodic Death Metal with growled vocals.
A strange thing happened the first couple of times I listened to “Fragments of Death”. I just couldn’t get into it all at all. It all sounded the same and I wondered what on earth I was going to write about it. I stopped listening half way through. Then later and in another place I picked it up and had another go. My ears pricked up at the first track, and then came “Only Death in Our Wake”. Suddenly it was vibrant, mobile and I found myself headbanging to it as I walked across the room. The album had taken on a new life. From what I had considered anonymous, the next track “Absence of Faith” took on a menacing Gothic persona. The pace was steadier than the previous tracks but this was an exercise in control. “Absence of Faith” is a well structured song and reminded me very much of Crematory in respect of both its structure and vocals. I was suddenly starting to enjoy this album. The pace picks up again with “Living Nightmare”. Energetic drumming and high dosages of melody accompany those strangely rampant but familiar growls. We then enter epic territory as you might expect of a track entitled “The World Will Die in Flames”. It was never going to be trivial and it isn’t. The drum beats darkly and the keyboards send an ominous ring through the Metal framework. Haunting female vocals add to the sombre proceedings on “Anxiety”. It’s fluid and melodic, but always dark. The instrumental constancy and the lead singer’s melodic growls see to that. Contrary to what I first thought, each track is an interesting cameo. It is true that once the pace is set, it’s almost but not unreservedly fixed for the track but there’s always plenty going on. In the spirit of Gothic Metal, the atmospheric detail is good, never more so than on the gloomy instrumental “The Prophecy”. This track is exceptional as elsewhere the pace is mostly upbeat and if not that, it’s steady and forceful. So it is with the last three tracks “Remembrance”, “Old Forgotten Song” and “Where Angels Do Not Fly” which between them sum up neatly the dark and epic properties of this work.
So my advice is to listen to this album at least three times before making any judgement. Maybe I wasn’t listening properly. The fact is that “Fragments of Death” is as good a piece of melodic Gothic Metal as you’ll find.
http://www.myspace.com/graveworm
Andrew Doherty
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