Mr. Vu – Dark Tales (2013)

The hardest job here at Infernal Masquerade is giving a bad review to very well intentioned releases. Mr. Vu sadly falls in this category, since while their enthusiasm is amazing, the lack is musical skills gets the better out of “Dark Tales”. We understand this is just a demo version of the tracks, but there are some glaring issues with them. Trying to be as minimally mean as we can, we will continue to go over this album.

Opening with “Only the hard ones”, we can instantly hear the production deficiencies in this album, but since they are demo versions of songs we will let this go. The style is quite decent, reminding us of retro-80’s music at points; however, the vocals are just awful. We have heard tons of bad singing before, but sadly Mr. Vu is probably one of the worst. Components of the music are quite solid, like on “King of Vitiation”, where we have solid guitar/bass guitar lines, but the vocals and some of the arrangements are very odd.

Songs like the trippy and mellow “Stranger” are quite decent and create a nice ballad-esque atmosphere. If this one-man band had another singer, it would be considerably better. The guitar solos are quite good, but on “Intermission” we can hear how they class with the very amateur drumming. This is another area that Mr. Vu needs to outsource to a better qualified musician. Weird experiments like the odd vocals on “Witchcraft” actually work well in creating a unique atmosphere in the music, but the core instrument’s deficiencies make the song unbearable at times. Other tracks like the video game-esque “Rising of Osiris” are quite decent if you can picture them with a plethora of changes. The theatrical closer “To be Continued” is actually quite good, and gives you a certain and dramatic Brodway-esque vibe.

Overall, we think that “Dark Tales” needs a LOT of work to be as efficient and imposing as Mr. Vu wants. There are good ideas and interesting song structures, but there are way too many technical deficiencies to really enjoy this album. If Mr. Vu decided to get a new vocalist and a few session band-members, we are sure that this album would be 300 times better. After giving this release more than 10 spins, we find a lot of potential underneath all the flaws, so we can only hope that Mr. Vu greatly improves it before its final version comes out.

Label: Self-Released

Release: August 2013

Genre: Metal / Rock

Country: Germany