Nigredo

Nigredo is that rarest of beasts, a goth/darkwave concept album. It's not completely clear what the concept is, but bandleader Adrian Hates reportedly spent a significant amount of time in libraries and antiquarian bookstores pulling together ideas from ancient mythology, all of which seem to have acted as background inspiration rather than direct lyrical sources. The music itself is an interesting combination of elements. On the one hand, there's the knee-jerk Teutonic dystopianism that you hear on just about every Euro-industrial album. On the other hand, where most of its fellow gloom-and-doomers pound those sentiments home with thuggish, jackboot rhythms, Diary of Dreams delivers them more gently and with more rhythmic interest. They also sing a few of these songs in German, which is always better than the goofily stilted English that most other German electro bands insist on using. "Giftraum" and "Unmensch" are two of the stronger songs here, though "Kindrom" is very good as well, with its relatively optimistic chorus ("All the psychos in the world can't bring me down") and restrained, well-crafted groove. Unfortunately, too many of the other songs on this album fail to generate similar interest; "Charma Sleeper" and "Tales of the Silent City" are more useful as mood generators than compelling as music, and "Psycho-Logic" is downright tedious. The program ends with a hidden track, a mostly instrumental exercise in unstructured, gloomy impressionism.