03/29/2024

Moonspell – “Darkness and Hope” [Century Media]

After Moonspell’s last album “The Butterfly Effect” from 1999 and a change of style, Moonspell have return to their roots and released the album”Darkness and Hope” which brings us back to the direction of the first 2 albums. This time Moonspell have more experience and they brought us a great album combined with new elements and the old gothic elements.
The singing of Fernando Riberio is the same gothic singing we heard on the last 2 albums, but it sound much better and sometimes he return to the old doom metal singing style as we heard on the albums “Wolfheart” & “Irreligious” from the mid 90’s. The album has a very good production.

I think that if you compare the music style in the album to the other Moonspell album there is difference, the guitar wah-wah effect sounds almost in each song and makes this album sounds more American – some mixture between The Cult guitar sound on their album “Sonic Temple” and Metallica guitar sound on the album “Metallica” (the black album) especially on songs like: “How we became fire” & “rapaces”, thought the keyboards and the singing of Fernando makes this album sound more dark.

My favorite songs in this album are: “Than the serpents in my hands”, very good bass work, the keyboards brings some darkness, 2 different singing style and good guitar parts. The song “firewalking”, which brings us the old Moonspell sound with some new sounds & the song “Noctuna”, which I find to be the most interesting song in the album.
The CD contains 2 CD-ROM video bonus tracks that one of them is uncensored version the “butterfly fx” video.

Track Listing:

  1. Darkness and Hope
  2. Firewalking
  3. Nocturna
  4. Heartshaped Abyss
  5. Devilred
  6. Ghost Song
  7. Rapaces
  8. Made of Storm
  9. How We Became Fire
  10. Than the Serpents In My hands
  11. Mr Crowley

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