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Beware metalheads, The Eternal are here to brood the living shit out of you. This is yet another Doom debut from Firebox Records, who are making a bit of a name for themselves with some good signings of hitherto unknown bands. The Eternal are an outfit from Australia - a land more noted for Power and Black Metal than Doom, but that doesn't keep this from being pretty good.

This band plays a style of depressive rock/metal somewhere between Solitude Aeturnus, Katatonia (The later stuff) and Type O Negative. We have a pretty laid-back album with slow to slightly less slow songs, some good guitar work and some nice melodies. The vocals are midrange and a bit reminiscent of Katatonia, though these are better. They are not noticeably more passionate though, and on the whole the singer sounds like he's half asleep.

There is nothing actively bad about this, and it's decent background music, but there's nothing really exciting going on either. It's not very heavy or really that doomy, it's mostly mopey and gloomy instead. The guitars are too muted, and the music as a whole is just too relaxed for its own good: it seems to lack any sort of presence, to the point of being hard to actually pay attention to.

If you like gothy gloom rock, then you will like this much better than I do. It's not that I dislike it, but I really think this has very limited interest to metal fans. So while The Eternal are not bad, I can't say they are really that good either.