Listening to Daylight Dies’ Lost to the Living is like eating a pound of a good cheese. At first you are excited because of the lukewarm enjoyment you got from the last time you ate said cheese. The record spins, you take your first bite, Cathedral, the first track, is a delicious morsel mixing overt Dark Tranquility-esque melody with the art of old school British death/doom. Although cheesy, the melody is occasionally broken and the band explores short tangents into diminished dissonance, which serves as an excellent balance.

Now comes the second bite, its still good, but uncomfortably similar to the first. Come to the third bite, Daylight Dies shamelessly exploit the Opeth-y harsh/soft dynamic, which, as we all know, was genius… on the first 4 or even 5 Opeth records, but in this day and age is tired out and flat out corny (this is not assisted by still cornier lyrics about how “I am different, I hate people”). Now is when you start getting bored of the cheese, and second guessing the undertaking of eating an entire pound of it… Come to the 6th bite, although initially promising it sends all your gag reflexes into overdrive, instrumentation brings to mind Damnation, which, isn’t that bad just very, very unoriginal. Then come to vocals, oh sweet dear god the clean vocals… think Michael Akerfeldt meets Creed and Nickleback, yeah its that fucking bad. The vocals are like finding a piece of hair embedded in the cheese you have now spent nearly half an hour eating. Now the seventh bite is ok not as bad as the sixth, you started forgetting about the hair you find until… you get to the eighth track. Similar to the sixth track, but now a complete shameless Opeth rip-off, complete with spot-on Akerfeldt impersonation, the ninth just rehashing the same formula for the first few tracks.

As you finish up this ninth and final bite, you reflect on the whole experience, and after a few minutes you realize you really didn’t like the cheese enough in the first place to submit yourself to such an undertaking, you then eject the cheese, and return it to its case to spend eternity gathering dust.