(Symphonic Gothic Metal) Mortemia - Misere Mortem - 2010, APE (image+.cue), lossless

There will be a lot of comparison to Morten Veland's main band Sirenia in this review.
Morten Veland decided to make another project named Mortemia. There is a lot of direct comparison to Sirenia in this release due to Morten being the main man of both bands. "Misere Mortem" is a Gothic metal album with strong symphonic elements and incorporation of two main vocal styles, a french choir and growling vocals that never intertwine with each other which are both very clear in the mix and are easy to interpret most of the time.
A lot of readers of this review would be familiar of the bands Tristania and Sirenia and are aware that press comments on this album are that this is quite similar to Tristania's highly acclaimed album "Beyond The Veil", I concur as it doesn't particularly sound much like it in any way and the song lengths are much too short, considering "Beyond The Veil" has an average song length of 6 minutes compared to the longest here being 5:16. A more fair way to describe the sound of "Misere Mortem" would be the bridge between older Sirenia "At Sixes and Sevens, An Elixir For Existence" and Sirenia's most recent "The 13th Floor" with a complete absence of female vocals. It takes the symphonic elements that made "The 13th Floor" a good album and the strong presence of Morten Veland's growls in older Sirenia to make this an effort worth checking out.
After analysis of "Misere Mortem" it is definitely something that should of been released under the Sirenia name. The guitar tone, choirs, melodic guitar solo tone and symphonic elements seem to be lifted out directly from Sirenia. Maybe it was a choice of Nuclear Blast to not allow it to be released on their label under the Sirenia name since I doubt this type of music has a big enough audience.
"Misere Mortem" isn't a complete carbon copy of Morten Veland's previous work, there are several new elements also. Much more impressive guitar solos are evident as the one on the track "The Eye of the Storm" are very unlike Veland to do and the atmosphere of some choir bits e.g the intro of "The Pain Infernal and the Fall Eternal" are Mortemia unique and are well thought out. Thankfully the song structures are more complex on this album than recent Morten Veland endeavors and the lyrics are more darker than I have been recently accustomed to by him.
Not the most original album in terms of content in the Gothic metal scene but fans of bands such as Sirenia, Tristania and Trail of Tears or other metal bands closely based around harsh vocals and choir will most likely want to check this out. It is an incredible effort considering this album was made by one person and the assistance of a choir but I cannot rate it higher due to some lack of originality and self plagiarism on Veland's part.

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 2. March 2010, 17:11
Mortemia / Misere Mortem
Used drive : ATAPI DVD A DH20A4P Adapter: 3 ID: 0
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Installed external ASPI interface
Used output format : Monkey's Audio Lossless Encoder
Selected bitrate : High Lossless Compression
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : Yes
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files\Monkey's Audio\MAC.exe
TOC of the extracted CD
Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
---------------------------------------------------------
1 | 0:00.00 | 4:46.37 | 0 | 21486
2 | 4:46.37 | 5:16.54 | 21487 | 45240
3 | 10:03.16 | 5:10.57 | 45241 | 68547
4 | 15:13.73 | 5:02.30 | 68548 | 91227
5 | 20:16.28 | 4:09.38 | 91228 | 109940
6 | 24:25.66 | 4:30.17 | 109941 | 130207
7 | 28:56.08 | 3:50.27 | 130208 | 147484
8 | 32:46.35 | 3:52.62 | 147485 | 164946
9 | 36:39.22 | 4:00.16 | 164947 | 182962
Range status and errors
Selected range
Filename D:\Download\Mortemia - Misere Mortem.wav
Peak level 99.9 %
Range quality 100.0 %
Copy CRC 7A46AEE9
Copy OK
No errors occurred
AccurateRip summary
Track 1 not present in database
Track 2 not present in database
Track 3 not present in database
Track 4 not present in database
Track 5 not present in database
Track 6 not present in database
Track 7 not present in database
Track 8 not present in database
Track 9 not present in database
None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database
End of status report