Forever Slave-Tales for bad girls

Wacken
2008

I can’t say that I was exactly sure what to expect from this album and after the first play I still wasn’t sure. So I pressed on and after a few more plays everything began to take shape. This is supposed to be gothic metal of some type, but it’s not particularly good gothic metal or all that good at all. They come at it with big keyboards and slicked up production yet below that is a distinct lack of melodies, hooks and range. The music does make an attempt to be moderately heavy and direct at times. That’s slightly respectable yet the riffs are often too repetitious or else they try to stretch the song on for longer than they should. Either way it results in boredom for the listener and a lot of head scratching as to why they thought that minimal effort was going to yield anything other than minimal results. Vocalist Lady Angellyca is a model and I hope she is far more capable at that position than she is as a singer. The production helps to prop her voice up, but despite the assistance she is still very obviously lacking in range. Her voice is just rather sweet and although that’s okay it doesn’t particularly lend itself to the style they are attempting to pull off. She actually struggles more at conveying emotion than does her band. The larger problem with that is that this style gives more time and focus to the vocals which is all well and good if the singer can deliver, but unfortunately Lady Agellyca just delivers up a stale showing that does little to help her band’s cause. In the end this just feels like a project where they had an idea what they wanted to accomplish, but they lacked the skills to pull it off.