Band:	Philomels Epitaph
Album:	Promotional CD 2005
Style:	Black metal, Death metal
Release date:	2005
A review by:	Undercraft

01. A Deal, A Death, A Demon's Breath
02. Imps Across All Earthly Nations
03. Dream Of The Somnambulist

Simple, yet promising?

Philomel's Epitaph is a relatively new act spawned from members of bands such as Illnath, Urgehal and Asmegin. That's good to know because this was made by people that are experienced musicians and isn't another young, untalented act with the only purpose of wasting my time with awful music. Let's take a look then.

From the get-go I can recognize the vocals of Narrenschiff, who also handles the vocal duties at Illnath. While some might say that his vocals have the Cradle Of Filth signature, I beg to differ in that particular point, because nowadays any shriek that doesn't sound "necro" sounds "Cradle Of Filth", ahh kids these days.
Nevertheless, we have some good vocal variety here, you got shrieks, grunts, growls, whispers,
clean male vocals even ghoulish chants!

The music itself is basically Death Metal with some Black Metal elements here and there. The opening track "A Deal, A Death, A Demon's Breath" is a nice song but nothing that good to get excited about, next song "Imps Across All Earthly Nations" is much better with some playful imps singing, nice addition indeed! Third and last song "Dream Of The Somnambulist" is the most interesting in terms of songwriting, the different kind of vocals intertwine here creating a haunting atmosphere all through the song. The guitar also makes a worthy apparition here accompanied by a more than efficient keyboard.

If the band can create more songs like "The Dream Of The Somnambulist" I'm really interested in hearing their upcoming full-length debut, which is on process of recording.
Also, I'm expecting a improvement on the visual area, since I found the cover art in the Demo quite poor, along with the Logo, although they have a new one in their webpage that looks quite cool. All of this will be revealed to us in the upcoming full-length of Philomel's Epitaph (nice band name by the way).