I had been waiting ages for this one. However, Forever Slave seem to be in the habit of shooting themselves in the foot. The minute I heard about this band I got all excited since I love the idea of black metal with female vocals. So as soon as news reached me that Forever Slave’s demo was released I went over to their site to see one of the most bleak websites I’ve ever come across. A cyber-wilderness, a blank canvas promising updates only soon, but there was an offer to ‘purchase’ their demo. Being the mug that I am I shelled out the necessary amount of cash for it and after a month and it still hadn’t turned up. After a couple more weeks I got an email from PayPal saying “your money has been returned to your account since it was not collected by the vendor for over a month”. This shocked me since I thought bands were in the habit of picking up cash whenever they could, obviously something had gone seriously wrong. But the lack of updates on the website, the bad vendoring, the lack of any decent samples led me to lose hope in this band, not to mention various other stories I had heard about their mismanagement.

Finally I managed to get hold of Resurrection a few days ago. I wasn’t expecting anything special, just something listenable with maybe a glimmer of hope shining out of the tracks that we had a promising band on our hands. However, I wasn’t totally shocked when half way into the second track it was clear that this demo was a load of tripe. Lady Angelica clearly has a dream to be some kind of uber Gothic songstress as well as a model, so she’s arguably getting into this music for the wrong reasons. Not because she’s a vocal talent, for God’s sake she’s not, her vocals are some of the worst of any Gothic Metal album I have heard. Though she manages to keep more or less in tune, the tone of her voice is a horrible one and she sounds like she has someone’s hands round her throat while she’s pelting out the notes [if only] since the singing is so strained and unnatural, and her diction is non-existent. It’s all very well to have aspirations of being a singer, but from this it’s clear that she has very little talent in this way. There are some nice tunes, in places, such as Beyond Death’s Embrace and In Autumnal Equinox, but these in their own rights are not good or special enough to justify filling the space in your auditory canals with anything but air.

The songs themselves are bare, barren attempts at clichéd Gothic metal, with plain guitar riffs, boring melodies and one of the worst sins that any band can commit, the guitars and synths following the vocal lines to the note. In some places the synths are so naff that they sound as if they were taken from an episode of Quincy or The Rockford Files. Forever Slave want to be a good band, but it’s apparent that they’ve put the cart before the horse – they’re making music to get recognised, rather than making music that is naturally good. This is a potentialless record. I see very little of worth coming out of this lot in the future and if they do produce anything decent over the next couple of years I will buy a hat just so I can eat it. For the rest of you though, there are far better discs you can spend your money and time on.

3/10