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A Journey to the Darkest Kingdom is the third album from Brazil's The Kryptik. They play an uber-symphonic style of black metal with ubiquitous keys twisting and turning around and above the raspy vocals and dry, menacing guitars. This makes for a haunted, creepy atmosphere throughout the album, one that is unsettling but short of truly disturbing (whether that is a good or bad thing depends on what you want out of your black metal). The pacing is slow and ominous much of the time, further contributing to the web of dread The Kryptik are weaving. The pieces are here, and the songs are put together the way you want, but they are long and sometimes overly self-indulgent (closing the album with an 8+ minute instrumental that sits on one or two motifs the whole time had me reaching for the stop button), with the whole album clocking in at a hefty, slightly bloated 69 minutes. There are good riffs and effective passages, but sometimes they get lost, and the longer songs don't always hold up their entire length. The Kryptik could trim quite a bit from A Journey to the Darkest Kingdom and it would be just as effective, if not more so. If you are a fan of Emperor and the hell-spawned legions of similar artists, this is an album for you.