Dark Lunacy - Forget Me Not

I’ve written many reviews on albums that I discovered in a particular point in my life. That point in time was from early 2007 to the spring of 2008, which was when I FIRST really actually GOT INTO extreme metal. Many of the first extreme metal bands I discovered at the time were melodic death bands. These bands were Scar Symmetry, Amon Amarth, Nightrage, Arch Enemy, Wintersun (the last band I discovered during that time period), and Dark Lunacy. I found Dark Lunacy on this Pandora-ish website (NOT Pandora) where I found other metal bands like Fleshgod Apocalypse, Vomitory, blessthefall, and Impending Doom. To this day, I remember that the exact song I heard on here by Dark Lunacy was the masterpiece known as Serenity (I’ll talk more about that particular track later in the review). In Dark Lunacy’s first album, they lay down a lot of experimentation with emphasis on the mixture of baroque/classical elements and crunchy melodic death chunks. The unfortunate thing is that they through all those hard chunks into the blender, but they didn’t let the blender run for long enough; so the smoothie didn’t flow with ease and everything wasn’t perfectly mixed together. In other words, the band didn’t put enough effort into refining and perfecting the mixing of the two elements; they had a really hard time flowing together in a smooth and efficient manner. Three years after the release of Devoid, Dark Lunacy puts out their sophomore follow-up, Forget Me Not.

Forget Me Not puts a little less emphasis on the baroque elements and a little more focus on the metal side of things. Here’s the interesting part: there isn’t as much of an improvement on Devoid’s HUGE fault as I would have liked to see. In the track after the intro, the guitars are noticeably louder than the classical instruments; but the classical instruments still seem to be REALLY out of place…but not as out of place as they were in Devoid. The violin in Lunacyrcus cuts through the music with no trouble at all like a brand new razorblade sliding across soft skin. The baroque elements sound a little less baroque-ish and more traditional. That minor change right there made the baroque elements fit the music SO MUCH BETTER! My favorite new element that Dark Lunacy put in is the accordion during the really atmospheric parts.

The BIG improvement that Dark Lunacy made during this album is that every musician seemed to get ten times better in every way imaginable! The new drummer has much more creativity and color in his playing. He also has the ability to play with considerable speed and technicality and use blast beats during the perfect times. The guitarists have a very dark and powerful sound that screams with emotion. The bassist actually plays a MUCH bigger part in the music on this album than on Devoid. The bassist plays little “solos” here and there all throughout the album and he never sounds dry and empty like some bassists do; this guy plays with color. And last of all, the vocalist’s growls fit the definition of truly powerful growls. There really isn’t much else I need to say about the vocals other than that.

The strongest and best song off this album is Serenity. Although this track is broken up into sections that alternate between soft piano ballads and SUPER melodic death metal storms; the song is pretty much 50/50 as far as balance between the two sides goes. I’ve never forgotten the part that the piano plays in the very beginning of the song. It’s one of those things that you don’t have to listen to it to jog your memory, it’s one of those song clips that engraves itself in your memory to the point where you can play it in your head on command and it sounds EXACTLY like the original recording. I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular song doesn’t do that for you, but I’m more than positive that you know what I’m talking about and that it’s happened to you before. Serenity is one of the most melodic and depressive melodic death songs as well as being one of my favorites. And it’s RARE that a single SONG speaks out to me this much; so don’t take what I just said lightly.

Forget Me Not is a HUGE improvement from Devoid, but it still has a whole lot of room for more improvement. Now that Dark Lunacy improved both the baroque side and the metal side of their music, it’s time that they put their primary focus on successfully mixing the two elements together to make something amazing. I would give this album 16/20 for being a very memorable album and for just being awesome. I would recommend this to EVERYONE.