• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

This is what we waited so long for? I'm not saying this is a bad album, but after four years and so much drama, I expected a powerful, magisterial album to signal the return of one of metal's truly great bands. Instead, we get the long-awaited Make It Dark, which succeeds in feeling pretty half-assed overall.

For one, this is really short, and shorter still on new material. At 36 minutes it is very short for a full-length, especially one this long in coming. And while closing track "Beyond the Gate" is a fine tune, it is not a new song. It's actually a re-recording of a track off their Triumphing True Metal demo from way back in 1997. I'm glad to hear it redone so well, but it means that really, this album contains about 28 minutes of new music. That's all they could manage after all this?

Some people doubted this band could go on without fallen singer Tony Taylor, but let's call bullshit on that right away, as the band has worked with about a billion different singers over the years, Tony was just the best-known is all. New guy Jonny Aune does a bang-up job on this, and his voice suits the music perfectly. In fact, I'd love to hear his versions of old standards, as his voice has more energy than Taylor's did, and his presence kicks the energy level on this up quite a bit.

There are killer songs on here, like opener "Mystera", "The Stone", the title track, and the shredding "White Shadow", but there are also some dogs, like the awkward "Snow Leopard" and the painful "Torture Torture" - which is indeed torture to sit through.

Altogether I have to say this is a disappointingly minor work from TTD, and while it has some real high points and is solid overall, it can't touch the feet of albums like The Isle of Hydra, and there is no song on here as awesome as classics like "Ride the Night", "Axes & Honor" or "Sign of the Storm". It's not the loss of Taylor, but the fact that the songwriting is just not up to par.