I have a soft spot for Astral Sleep, as I have enjoyed their often arcane and weird take on Doom/Death. I appreciate that they don’t just mine the Sabbath vein or My Dying Bride and actually seem interested in trying different things. That’s why I am disappointed that their latest album is not doing it for me.

This is still very much in the vein of their other material, but the production sucks, I mean it’s really bad. You can’t even just enjoy the riffs when they sound this muddy and feeble. Vocalist Markus Heinonen uses his clean vocals way too much, and they are not any better than they used to be, so he is mostly just moaning or whining and it’s really unpleasant to listen to. When he stays in his growl this sounds better, but still not good. I think this could be punched up a half point with a better recording, but that alone would not fix the overall tepid songwriting. Weak.