Hailing from eastern Germany, Fall of Serenity are a decent melodic death band with an EP and a debut full length under their belts previous to this new CD, Royal Killing. This is not a groundbreaking CD but that’s not always a detriment. Some formulas exist because they work, and in this case, it’s working just fine. Ten songs of familiar melodic death hooks, double bass drumming and great vocals make for a really listenable album.
The vocals are what I noticed more than anything. A lot of melodic death has the shouting growls that are prevalent in acts like Carnal Forge or The Haunted, but not René Betzold in Fall of Serenity. The pitch is still in the midrange that you’d expect to find in melodic death, but the vocals don’t sound shouted, but rather growled more properly, and they sound awesome for it. The raspy, grizzly sound reminds more of black metal style vocals, just not as high up.
The drummer is pretty damn good too. It’s tough sometimes when you hear so much of this type of music to remember that doing what these guys do is not easy. When the music is boring, we tend to care less how well the band are playing it or not. Thankfully the band has backed up their skill with good songs. It takes a lot these days to get me to really want to headbang to something, but Fall of Serenity seems to have done the trick.
This if the first time I’ve listened to anything they’ve put out. I’m now interested in both hearing their work previous to Royal Killing and waiting to see if they can continue to put out quality records in the future.
