My Darkest Time is a Christian Doom Metal band from Macedonia. In their own words the band describes themselves as “extreme doom with crushing growls and echoing female vocals.” The band is comprised of Zarko on extreme vocals and instrumentation, Marina on female vocals, and Kris on soprano female vocals. Transient is the band’s third full length album and serves as my initial jumping on point as I have never heard their previous material.
Initially My Darkest Time reminded me a bit of Paramecium with their sludgy death vocals and the operatic female vocals. Zarko has a lot of great ideas that are unfortunately not brought to full fruition due to some sloppy guitar work. While Zarko’s lead guitar playing is excellent and even reminds me of the melancholy guitar work of My Silent Wake, his rhythm guitar sounds uneven and imprecise. There is some awkward riffing found in some of the songs that doesn’t always match up to the programmed drums and distracts the listener from the sorrowful atmosphere the band was going for. The beginning of Fleeting Shadow is a good example of this. The keyboards on the other hand are excellent and really do a good job of solidifying the atmosphere on Transient. I also found the female vocals, when appropriately used, to be of high emotional quality and made the songs very dynamic. Unfortunately there are some moments where the female vocals sound very compressed and hard to understand, especially on the song After This. Zarko’s vocals, while mostly good, sometimes leave a bit to be desired. He generally sticks to a lower register growl, but at times it sounds less like a growl and more like he is whispering gruffly into the microphone. This takes away from the overall vocal impact. There are also small issues with the mixing that make the vocals very hard to understand without printed lyrics.
Transient has very insightful lyrics taken from the Biblical books of Job and Ecclesiastes and they really compliment the sorrowful and introspective atmosphere of the CD. Zarko also has an amazing testimony that can be found at the original My Darkest Time website at freewebs.com/mydarkesttime/story1.htm where he details his struggles with cancer and how it made him stronger in faith. Since the lyrics are so insightful it is a real shame that the music is not as complete as it could be. I think that My Darkest Time has the potential to be a great Doom Metal band, but they just need to fine tune their sound for the next time around.
Review by Daniel Terry
