Warning! If you weren’t depressed and/or scared of the world already, you will be when you’ve thrown this CD into your disc-player! I advice you not to be home alone when listening to this...

The previous releases of Australian goth metal outfit Virgin Black are unknown to me, but they might be worth checking out if they are anywhere near as interesting as this the first part of a trilogy recorded with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Labelling ‘Requiem – Mezzo Forte’ a metal album would be wrong. It’s rather a classical album, in the vein of Mozart’s scarier works (Requiem), with the addition of a few metal or rock parts. …and I am Suffering and Domine hold the most metal-ish riffs, the former for about ten seconds at the end, the latter in a Paradise Lost inspired fashion, with growl not unlike the stuff heard on ‘Lost Paradise’…but with the twist that there is an operatic choir in there as well. The next track, Lacrimosa, also holds some decent heavy guitars.
 

Perhaps the atmosphere evoked by some of Dead Can Dance’s tunes isn’t too far off much of the material, when I think of it, but with a far more bombastic sound.

A haunting female vocal accompanied by a male voice lead the listener through the seven tracks of gloom and doom (two of these are ten minute songs, by the way…), and despite the constant bombardment of orchestral bombast, it never really grows to be too much as you could expect from this kind of music.

Try it. It works for me.