Band:	Darkmoon
Album:	Grief
Style:	Extreme gothic metal
Release date:	1998
Guest review by:	Bas

01. A Godless Place
02. The Deceiver
03. Moonshineflood Darkness
04. These Voices
05. The Picture Of Dorian Gray
06. Katharsis

The first demo of this Swiss quintet is the only of their works which has such a vast use of keyboards. And although this is by far not the greatest work they have produced it still is quite awesome. It mainly relies on the ingredients gothic metal and black metal, or extreme gothic metal if you prefer. The intro is a quite misleadingly pretty, but simple, keyboard solo which then leads into a really killer song, a song which was my overall favourite song for a while in fact.

The drumming is purely background most of the time and sometimes also quite inaudible, except for atmospheric purposes. Like always with Darkmoon the bulk of the music comes from the two guitars, who always release either very crunchy headbang riffs or very tranquil "calm-before-the-storm" melody lines from their strings. Matthias' vocals clearly aren't as great yet as on later releases, but of course that's not to be expected for a first demo. The growls are deep, yet not guttural at all, sometimes quite fast too. As for the guitars, usually one of the two is playing something, the main part of the music, and the other is playing something quite different in the background.

All of the music, but especially the guitar solos, are very melodic. Yet, still quite enjoyable. The production isn't the worst I've heard for first demos, but it really isn't good. I think Grief could have been much better if the mixing would have been done a bit better. Like I said though, I've heard worse and for a demo it's really acceptable.

Listening to the music it's instantly clear that this is a band which is still trying to find their style. This especially shows in the fact that the gothic and black elements are kept apart most of the time instead of blending together. Often the songs have a lot of variation and use a lot of different riffs throughout the track, keeping the basic melody of the song thoughout. But the different parts are also often rather disjointed and don't fit together seamlessly at all.

At the end of the day this is a really great start for a young band and a great piece of music, but it is also very immature musically.