Album Review: Dark Sarah - The Golden Moth

Cinematic metal. Those are two words that scare me when I come across them. When I think of metal, cinema isn't something that comes to my mind very often. The world of cinematic writing, and the soundtracks where it is usually found, have little to do with the basic structure of metal as we have come to embrace it. Cinematic writing, as I often hear, eschews the immediacy of riffs and hooks for an approach that relies on atmosphere and scope to wow us. While there are times and places where that can work, I find it lacking for entire albums. I'm not saying metal needs to be a punch in the teeth (I don't really like that style, to be honest), but it's very easy to get drawn out to the point the songs feel like a used up elastic band. So does Dark Sarah avoid that fate?

Let's take a look at "Trespasser", the first full track on the record. It starts out with a heavy riff that gets your blood pumping... and then calms down into a soft crawl while the two vocalists trade barely whispered lines. The metal kicks back up for the chorus, but Heidi's vocals are so high and laden with vibrato that the lyric gets lost, while JPs vocals are so much deeper that they don't blend well enough.

The other issue is that the melodies they reach for are of the variety I have long expressed my displeasure with; long held notes with no urgency to bend around a hook. Yes, they can showcase the power and beauty of a singer's voice, but they lack bite, and are so soft they leave no impact on a listener's memory.

The story of the record is the namesake character escaping the underworld to a wasteland, and then teaming up with a dragon to find their way to the gods. That's rather standard stuff for epic power metal, but it leaves me a bit confused. The settings, and the dragon character, aren't backed up by the music that we're hearing. So much of it is triumphant and uplifting that it flies in the face of the story. The wasteland should require more gritty music, and the dragon needs to have a metallic snarl behind him, but that's not what the record delivers. Concept albums are always tough to pull off without sounding cheesy, and this is one of the reasons why. "Star Wars" was filmed on set with Darth Vader's voice being performed as Scottish. That's the sort of non-sequitur we end up with here, though obviously not to that degree.

That feeling makes it harder to fully embrace the good material on the record. "Wheel" and "My Beautiful Enemy" are wonderfully pleasant symphonic metal with classical vocals, and a straight-forward album of songs like that would be quite enjoyable. However, I can't ignore the cognitive dissonance that exists. Every detail of an album matters, especially when you say it is like a movie telling an epic story. Plot holes can ruin a movie, and there are audio equivalents for albums.

There is also no momentum built up at any point. There are moments in "Pirates" that hit the right marks for the story, but they get swallowed up by long passages of quiet ambiance and soft crooning. Why is a dragon crooning?

That confusion is the main takeaway I had from this album. There are aspects to what Dark Sarah is doing here that I really like, but the entire experience is hampered by the concept. Once you get beyond that first song, there are ample hooks and glorious moments, but the songs spend so much time setting the stage for that scene they feel like one-liners, and not routines. I wish I could say otherwise, but "The Golden Moth" is a promising collection of ideas that can't overcome the clunky execution of a concept album. That's a shame, because I hear a lot of potential here to be a more metallic version of Karnataka's last album, which was a masterstroke of cinematic writing. Maybe next time.