Band:	Era Decay
Album:	Prelude
Style:	Melodic death metal, Doom metal
Release date:	August 2009

01. Sweet Melancholy
02. Hall Of Dreams
03. Unheard Screams Of Beautiful Pain
04. Path To Nowhere

It is very nice that every now and then new interesting groups emerge willing to give their contribution to the art field we have. Era Decay are a young melodic death metal act from Romania who cite Opeth and Dark Tranquillity among the sources of their inspiration and, so it is, the influence can be heard in what they write. Prelude is their first demo release, the first step towards the grand evolution which, I hope, brings fruitful results to the group and to the listeners. I will quit beating about the bush here and write some lines about the release now.

Prelude is a fine short introduction of the music of the band and a hopeful glance into what we may be waiting from the group in future. The magic word here is melodic death metal with a very heavy stress on melody and a lot lighter approach to extreme metal, which will be very enjoyable to all those who love the genre and expect light and moving melodic passages instead of rich display of guttural growls, fast drumming and wild guitar usage. Prelude clearly focuses on slower pace in songs and provides warmer, milder and more acoustic guitar work. The keyboard melodies are very nice, especially the arpeggio passages. One piano passage recalls the atmosphere of the Italian group Macbeth. The binding of guitar and keyboards is very well done on Prelude.

As this is a demo and consists of not much songs, and all of them are of quite good quality, it is not easy to bring out the especially outstanding ones. I personally point out the good characteristics of "Hall Of Dreams", a track with very fine melody and "Path To Nowhere", also a very nice song. The melodic structures and compositions displayed on this demo are promising and if the group continues the style they have shown on this release on their future work as well, we may be having a very good melodic death metal group one day. Since this appears to be a first try, it cannot pass without any weak points. Here these would be the rawness of sound at some points, whether it is because of production or deliberate. There could be some more diversity in the vocals as well. A play of different vocal styles would always enrich the music as a whole and in this band's case, even a female (backing) vocalist could also do a grand job at some point. All of this is up to the group and I do hope they will come up with new interesting releases in the future.