I’m not going to say that there wasn’t anything good about this album. Instrumentally, there were some fun parts. The drums were always mixing it up and keeping it heavy, and I enjoyed the guitar work, for the most part. I mean, it was nothing to write home about, but when it wasn’t going into some weird punky riffs, I liked its typical, black metal sound.

The coolest part of this album was also one of the strangest parts. See, it’s a 30 minute album. It’s pretty dinky. And with a six minute and a seven minute song on there, there isn’t much room left for everything else. Drowned In Silence takes up three valuable minutes of the running time, starting off with eerie static and spooky drums, which escalate into an actually awesome tribal beat. I suddenly wanted to see an Irish dancing routine in studded kilts and corpse-paint. But that’s all the entire song is. Good mood music, but more like an album intro than track number five.

There’s another even more pointless song that doesn’t have the cool factor of Drowned in Silence, and it ends the album. At four and a half minutes long, Deserted is a complete waste of album space. In the first couple of minutes, there were about ten notes picked on an acoustic guitar over annoying background noise. Yes, the guitar gets cool a little later in the song, but no, it’s nothing special. And the last thirty seconds of the song is complete silence. Complete. Silence. The whole track makes me think these guys were tickled with themselves over what a work of “art” it was. I’m sure the song has a lot of deep, artistic meaning to the band, but I’m missing the meaning and I’m pretty sure anyone else who listens to this and wasn’t directly involved in making the album in any way will miss it too.

By far, though, what does this album in are the vocals. Let me try to describe them to you. Well, there were several instances of awful shouting; not growling at all, just shouting. Shouting entire verses. So in comparison to those vocal disasters, the growling vocals should have sounded great. But I literally felt like I was listening to a howling infant superimposed over blast beats. Besides the shouting man and the screaming baby, there was one other vocal technique used that I would say sounded like a mixture of old-school AFI with Rage Against the Machine. And that is not a good style, at least when used in a would-be black metal song.

There was something punk about Dodsferd’s album amidst the black metal, and I guess that’s cool. Actually, no it’s not. I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work for me. I’m not saying bands must always stick to whatever given genre they’re "in", and I’m not saying you can’t mix genres to make amazing hybrids. If you’re going to do it though, you’re gonna have to be better than these guys.