2007-03-05
Dark Forest is a one man symphonic black/Viking metal project, the brainchild of one David Parks, who players the guitars, bass, keyboards and drum programming on this, his debut album. Being a one man band, this has to suffer in some ways, but surprisingly, in not as many as can be expected.
Musically this is on the more melodic side of black/Viking metal, with highly melodic orchestrated keyboards, and fine black metal riffs. In some of the tracks you can actually fit in melodic vocals and the result would be something like Viking power metal, but it's the blast-beats that tend to stir away from that, and that leads me to the first, and probably the only real problem with the release. Programmed drums cannot sound as good as real ones, and that's a given fact. Still, Parks does his best with that, and I can't say it hurts the release too much, certainly because the rest of the material is quite impressive indeed.
From the epic sounding "Wind And Waves" it's quite clear Parks comes from the Norwegian school of thought, with some real
Bathory influences in there; Fast and epic guitar riffs, atmosphere enhancing keyboards, he can plays both real well, combining some strong melodies too. "Under The Northern Fullmoon" is one of my favorite tracks here, again Parks demonstrates a good sense of composition, and one can only imagine what would a real band using his writing talent would sound like.
As I said, it isn’t prefect, but considering it being a one man show, with a limited budget obviously, I must hand it to Parks for doing quite a memorable and well written piece here, as far as one man Viking metal projects go, this is definitely a strong one. And by the way, great cover artwork as well.
Alon Miasnikov
