Nice, solid mellow death, clearly resembling influences such as Dark Tranquillity. Darkemist constant interaction between energetic vocals and sweet melodies carry the songs more into a conciliatory rhythm than a frontal assault on your senses; something that far from excluding the more “traditional” metalheads, in forces us to recognize just how much has metal grown since the early years of Venom and the likes.

Relief is the second album from this Chilenean death band, and it comes full of precise and beautiful moments that don’t quite surpass what has been done by the likes of Detonation, DT or even one of my favorite mellow bands Noumena; but it firmly establishes the genre within the margins of the elements that make this style such an appealing sound by exploiting the best assets they have; catchy very melodic thick guitar lines, death/hardcore and sometimes clean vocal lines and a well substantiated keyboard line that just appears when its needed and doesn’t get caught in a willful overuse… like I stayed in the beginning of the review a solid piece of mellow metal.

The biggest problem for Relief is the lack of variety it contains, most of the songs follow a familiar if not identical pattern of composition, the songs are good don’t get me wrong, but just how many times in a row can you hear the same song is the real question? And Darkemist does provoke the illusion of repeating their formula way to many times, creating a certain exhaustion on the listener that doesn’t quite allow you to enjoy their nice melodies.

Relief is a good album, it promises to deliver good mellow death and it does, song after song they fulfill their duties; the problem is that they don’t risk a second to bring something unique and distinctive to their music that might just put them ahead of their scene; maybe a good attempt to this are the interesting almost “space” like keyboards on “Maybe if you bleed” a nice song, with some terrible background vocals if you ask me, totally unnecessary, but at least they do gamble a little with the song, and that is a lot when listening to a very “un-dimensional” record.