An Album a Day Keeps the Doctor Away #1: Moonspell - Memorial

Hello and welcome to your new favourite segment on this blog: An Album a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, in which I will effectively be dodging doctor visits for the next two and a bit years.

That’s a joke.

No, for the next 2.8 years I will actually be listening to one album from my library, per day, that I’ve either never listened to, or have only listened to partly. Once I’ve listened to the album I will do a quick write up for it. Why? Well, because I can, and because I have too damn many albums I’ve never listened to. 1022 of them to be exact.

So in preparation for this event, I took one song from each of these albums and put them all into a shuffled playlist. Every day, starting today, I will randomly generate a number from 1 to 1022, find the song at that number in the playlist, and listen to that album.

And today, Monday the 24th of February 2020, on the inaugural day of An Album a Day, our randomly generated number is 105. This means today we are listening to Moonspell’s 2006 release, Memorial.

Moonspell // Memorial

Based on hearing two albums previously (Alpha Noir and Omega White) Moonspell have always been my favourite goth metal band who aren’t HIM. Omega White is definitely my favourite of the two and I still listen to it a lot. I prefer its softer, goth rock leanings to the heavier side of Alpha Noir. And Memorial is more on the Alpha Noir side of things. Not to say that’s a bad thing. I like quite a few of the songs here. Blood Tells has an almost Maiden riff through the verse which I love. Luna would be right at home next to Sacrificial from Omega White, and Birgit Zacher’s vocal performance on it is sublime (even though she only really says one word). Upon the Blood of Men is huge: big chords in the verses and big, double-kick, bang-your-head-rhythms in the choruses. And At the Image of Pain almost sounds like Primordial at points and I fuckin love Primordial. But largely, this isn’t an album I’d listen to a lot in 2020. I still like this kind of music, but don’t love it as much as I used to. It just doesn’t have enough diversity to keep me coming back to it. I’d rather go for Alpha Noir, for the heavy side of Moonspell, because it’s got better choruses, and I’m a slut for a good singalong in goth metal. And of the three I’ve now listened to, I will still take Omega White over all of them because I still prefer soft, croony, vampire-goth Fernando to savage, barky, werewolf-in-disguise Fernando.