The Ultimate Review of Reflection

The fact that this band played symphonic dark gothic metal was what caught my attention. To be honest I have no idea why I was even searching for more symphonic gothic metal bands, but it appears to be a genre that's growing on me. Releasing three records - none of which being a full-length album - in eleven years is a pretty weak effort, but I decided to listen to something by Annatar anyway. Seeing as demos are a pain in the ass to find, I settled on the EP Reflection, which consists of only two tracks.

The first thing I have to say is that I fail to see how this stuff is darker than ordinary symphonic gothic metal. Maybe it's in the lyrics that I don't really care about, but nothing else stands out as being exceptionally dark. The tuning might be a little lower than most other gothic bands, but it isn't actually any heavier. The keyboards are more subtle and you have to actually listen hard to hear them and the drums are fairly discreet too, both of which I feel have a bit of a negative effect on the band.

If we go through both songs separately, the title track is better overall. The opening kind of puts me off, with chugging guitars (seemingly a feature of Annatar's music) and slow, plodding drums. I don't particularly like the effects created by the keyboard either, so maybe the subtlety is a good thing there. The vocals are pretty good, but the rest of the music puts me off. It isn't until the chorus that things begin to pick up, but it's still missing that something. That something comes in at the halfway point in the form of an unexpected change of direction from the music before the guitar solo (nothing great there, but it beats the chugging in the background). It ends on a high-note with the chorus again twice, but it just never quite finds top gear. It doesn't give me the same kick in the gut that I got from Imperia's Touch of Your Hand or Serpent & Seraph's Tears of Niviane. The power isn't there, despite the assumption that I'd made that it would be.

So if that punch is missing from the better track, you can imagine that Out of My Hands is even more lackluster. It starts off well with some decent hooks and it finally seems like we're going somewhere, but it soon dissolves into mindless chugging. The singing is still great, but when there's no depth to a song at all that's not going to make up for it. Plus, she might be great at singing but she's still not got the same hypnotic power over me that Helena Michaelsen and Kas St.Clare have.

Overall, nothing too fascinating about this band. A bit too much core for my liking in the way that the guitars are played and not enough force to make any real impact on me means that I don't see a reason to bother searching for anything else (and if someone else has already described it as being impossible to find then I think I'll save my time). It's okay, far from being terrible, but it doesn't merit anything above an average score.
Final Score: 94 / 100