Mysterium – Soulwards (2003)
After quite a successful debut album The Glowering Facades Of Night, German band Mysterium recorded just the album that they were expected to. It lacked a clearness and depth of sound. All this you will find in the album Soulwards. Having made the guitars heavier, the band opened for us new dimensions of their talent. It is a stunning, simply unimaginable mixture of melodic death metal, doom / death and gothic (dark) metal, which creates music with a mystical flavor, which cannot easily be defined…
Soulwards is a real successful story. It’s strange that I did not pay attention to Mysterium before … Probably, it is because of its not very attractive name – such a metal stamp that does not correspond to their music at all. But let’s talk about its description … The album opens with the intro Ambivalentika. It is the best intro I have ever heard. Beautiful synth melody passes smoothly into the disturbing mystical passages and you can hear someone saying: “… sleep …” (this whisper we also can hear at the end of the album). Yes, the music definitely has the ability to catch your attention from the first note! It is like we find ourselves under a heavy rain, no, not even the rain, the real storm. Raging guitars, sharp riffs combined with the emotional vocalist’s voice, the constant change of rhythms and moods – everything is performed perfect, everything is exciting.
With the further listening to Soulwards, Sirrah crashes into my memory with its shocking, some kind of romantic keyboard parts with magnificent singing against a background of general madness; Awaiting Thy Pentacle Aeon with its exciting intro, which turns into a riff, very similar in style to the early Dark Tranquility; the final Sphereflight, probably because it absorbed all the beauty of Soulwards: interesting keyboard parts, heavy guitars, uncompromising and light melancholy. But in fact, there are no bad tracks in this album! After the final “… sleep …” you will sit stunned for a long time, hundreds of thoughts and images will pass through your mind.
It’s definitely the music, filled with strength and glory, It is demonstrated not only by its mood, but also by arrangements. This music is not just gloomy – it is like it emits the energy of despair and changes it to something good that can inspire us. This music carries the soul through the purifying sense experiences of another Order, different from those gray and vulgar, to which we are already so accustomed. This music will just explode your mind.