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Maine's 13 Winters are an interesting prospect; they have obvious talent in the instrumental department, and command a good knowledge of all metal genres (which they manage to cram into their second full-length Dark Palace Of Waterfalls). They have a female vocalist who flirts between a lofty faux-soprano and a haunting, blackened wail, and in the guitars there's a good degree of riffage, most of it culled from the Doom and Black Metal schools. Between mournful periods of despair, 13 Winters also inject Death Metal passages, some trendy Melo-Death, and a whole boatload of Gothic phrases that work to increase the atmosphere. Shame, then, that the opening title track is a total mess which tries to fuse these genres together with some kind of cohesion. It gets the album off to a bad start, despite some goodness in "Horizon's End", which is a quality Melo-Death cut that wouldn't be out of place on a Dark Tranquillity record, and the ambient "Fathoms Apart", which is genuinely quite listenable.

Overall, with a production that veers from good to bad to monstrous, Dark Palace Of Waterfalls is the kind of album you shouldn't have to experience these days, what with the formula of each style being so easy to mimic, and yet, here we have an example of how easy it is to miss the mark.