DARZAMAT is a band that’s rather unknown in our region, but in other countries their music is admired by a lot of people – and so on one of my Turkey-Trips I came across to the music of the Poles and was taken with In The Flames Of Black Art. A few years it was pretty quiet around the band, but with Oniriad they come back with a renewed Line-Up – beside the old Band members Szymon, Rafal „Flauros“ and Katarzyna, Damian "Daamr" Kowalski and Krystian "Bomba" Bytom joined the band.

The style didn’t change a lot; still they play bizarre, symphonic Metal which is coined by the special voice of Katarzyna – although they sound a bit straighter and calmer then before, without losing the special atmosphere they have. Here I also have to criticise the labels denotation “Gothic Metal”, because this is a too simple appellation when you think about the variety of the music of DARZAMAT. In fact they work with the genre-typical instruments and voices, but in contrary to other gothic albums Oniriad is full of energy and power and doesn’t want to fit into this drawer. Especially Katarzynas voice has to be accentuated: she accomplishes to accompany the slow, soft parts as well as the energic, powerful pieces and her voice never sounds thin or powerless at all – all those so called gothic singers should take an example on her. Unfortunately Katarzyna left the band directly after the recordings to move to the USA, so I hope that Karolina – the new singer – can replace her worthy. But also the male vocals in form of Flauros are worth mentioning – they perfectly merge together with the female vocals. As already mentioned the variety of styles at Oniriad is rather large, so the spectrum reaches from slow, soft numbers (e.g. Soporific) onto powerful songs (e.g. the Opener Into The Abyss Of Forgotten Woods) or the poppy Time without pitting each other out – far from it – the pretty different songs merge together as a whole, that’s best “consumed” as an entity – similar to a musical.

With Oniriad DARZAMAT released another great album – I hope that they can continue like this with the new singer as well. Although I wouldn’t recommend buying this CD blindly, because not all people will like this album – but I recommend listening to it the next time you drop into your CD store.