Whispers of Fate – Embrace My Winter

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It’s usually a great experience getting to hear fresh and new bands, but sometimes less than stellar bands find their way to you as well. Combined with poor production values this can result in a rather unpleasant listening experience. This unfortunately is the case with this debut release from unsigned Italian metal band Whispers of Fate. The band play female-fronted symphonic metal, and this release suffers from a few key, fundamental issues that make it very difficult to listen to. First and foremost, the keyboards are far too loud. The recording is drowned out by awful sounding keyboards poorly simulating string parts – this not only doesn’t fit well, but makes this record extremely painful to listen to. There are guitars, bass and drums on this recording but they are so quiet compared to the omnipresent synths. Second issue is the singer; whilst she may or may not be able to sing live, on this record she sounds passionless, regularly out of tune and simply not very good. If you are playing symphonic metal, vocals need to always be of a high quality as this is one of the main elements of your music that listeners will be paying attention too – poorly recorded vocals means bad symphonic metal. Finally, the songs themselves aren’t particularly good – to be fair, this could be put down to the keyboards strangling any melody out of this recording, but it doesn’t sound like there would be much worth salvaging. Ultimately this is not one worth checking out; though like any band there are always second chances, and perhaps this band can do much, much better next time.

Written by James Donovan
More: 2010, Albums, Female-fronted, Quick.Play Reviews, Symphonic, Unsigned, Whispers of Fate