89. Delain - "Dark Waters"

Those who follow my adventures in music journalism will be surprised to see this lot here. You see I gave the new incarnation of this once-revered Dutch act a bit of kicking. I went as far as describing new vocalist Diana Leah as a pound shop version of the previous incumbent.

The band didn’t take too kindly and decided to share my barbed words to their fevered followers who in turn took it in turns to mercilessly condemn my hatchet job. I stand by the review because they relied too much on regurgitating material associated with the previous vocalist. What they should have done is played much much more from this, the first album from the almost entirely new version of the band, as it is really rather good. 

The trick here is not to view this as a new Delain album, where it then has all the baggage of living up to their rather prestigious legacy. Instead, view this as a symphonic metal album by a band who happen to also be called Delain. If you do the latter, it is actually a really well-done and sumptuous feast of deliciously luxurious musical morsels. I stand by my summation of a current run of shows, but I also stand by the fact that I really like the new music they are creating, I just wanted them to rely much more heavily on it.