Band:	Forever Slave
Album:	Resurrection
Style:	Gothic metal
Release date:	2004
A review by:	Jeff

01. Overture: The Dark Secret Mysteries In Carpathians
02. Erzébet Báthory´s Song
03. In Autumnal Equinox
04. Ophelia´s Eyes
05. Beyond Death´s Embrace
06. Requiem: Funeral Of The Lost Soul

Forever Slave is a young combo from Spain. Like a lot of young bands nowadays, they chose to play Symphonic Metal with a female vocalist, Lady Angellyca. That's a bit dangerous, when we know that a lot of bands try to copy Nightwish or Within Temptation and at the end only do something hum? Don't worry, even if for sure there is a bit of Symphonic Power in the music of Forever Slave, there is also a big touch of real gothic music. Understand that the music of the band could be compared to a mix between Nightwish [especially for the style of the vocals] and old Theatre Of Tragedy. That's really interesting in my opinion?

"Resurrection" is a nice demo even if it suffers of a really disturbing problem of production [we will talk about it later]. As I said in my introduction even if there are some similitude with Symphonic Power Metal bands like Nightwish at least Forever Slave chose to do something really Gothic. At the end, even if the structure of the songs can be sometime near of Power, in general that's definitely more Gothic than anything else. Violins, sad and slow melodies in addition of the nice symphonic voice of Lady Angellyca. Like their singer, the musicians of the band aren't bad at all you could find good riffs and solo in the music of Forever Slave, and the four songs [4 because we have an intro and outro here] are promising. The violin for example gives this little pleasant originality to the music, that's nice. Without any doubts there is a lot of good points in the music of Forever Slave. And I really hope that they will follow the way of the Gothic music, not because that Symphonic Power is bad, but we are near of the saturation and it will be really hard for the new bands to get good deals soon.
No we will come to the bad point of the demo, the production [I don't talk about the artworks which are really good]. The problem with the cd is that I got it through a download. I have the songs compressed in 128kpbs, and maybe it can come form that, you all know that with this compression we don't have a good CD quality. But, I just think in fact that the problem comes from a lack of means, and some bad conditions of recording. The sound is not really bad that even promising, but that's not professional and we want something better. For example the voice of Angellyca is not really well mixed, and at the end the band suffers of this point. I wish some better means for the future, and that's possible some Demos have a better sound than some signed bands?

Forever Slave is not a real revolution but the music of the band is pleasant. With better means of production, with a better sound this demo could be a real nice album. But this little Gothic side of the music is nice and I like it, I hope that the band will hear my call, follow this way instead of the one of the Power Metal, it will be better at the end. But anyway if you like this kind of music, you must listen to this band, they are promising no doubt on it?