Tiamat: The Scarred People (2012)

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Guest review by Metallattorney. He is the law.

It was with great trepidation that I started listening to this album. My experiences with Tiamat have been inconsistent to put it lightly. I absolutely loved The Astral Sleep. It was a terrific album of atmospheric death metal and sounded quite unlike anything else I had heard to that point. I became aware that the band altered their sound drastically but checked out A Deeper Kind of Slumber anyway. That one bored me into a coma. So this is only the third full-length album that I have listened to by Tiamat. I guess we will see where this comes in.


Well this is gothic rock. There is the occasional metal influence but for the most part there is little to no aggression present in these songs. At the same time it is not as ethereal and dream-like as Slumber. The songs are slower paced with a lot of melody. There are guitar leads weaving around the mostly keyboard-driven melancholic music. The vocals are typically delivered in a dry, soothing baritone sounding similar to the vocals of Moonspell's Fernando Ribeiro.

If you are looking for atmospheric death metal, do not look here. This sounds like a completely different band than the one that recorded Astral Sleep. There are some metal influences present such as the driving force of the opening track and "Love Terrorists", but even those moments are fleeting. For the most part this is fairly straightforward gothic rock. The songs do grow old after awhile and I had a hard time retaining interest in it.

This is a perfectly acceptable release if you like this sort of thing. I however do not. There is a little bit more musically going on than on Slumber but I still will likely not listen to this very often, if at all.

The Verdict: 2.5 out of 5 stars



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