The Crystal Palace (Black with Blue Splatter Vinyl)

Usually Forlorn is classified as a melodic black metal band, but this album reflects way more than just that. “The Crystal Palace” involves elements from folk and even gothic metal, such as acoustic guitars, atmospheric keyboards, and croon vocals that could remind you of a Gregorian choir. As a matter of fact, this album is not anyway close to standard black metal, there’s no blast beat, is very melodic, the few growls are typical in death metal, etc. In most of the songs you can actually hear an acoustic guitar, 2 electric metal guitars, and the keyboards playing all together in a quite good melody.
“Aerefull Ferd” is one of the best songs in the album and also doesn’t have any death/black growls, just Gregorian kinda singing. Very acoustic and atmospheric but remaining in melodic metal, and don’t get me wrong, by atmospheric I don’t mean slow, this is definitely not doom.
In the other hand, “Baerer av Nordstjernen” does show death/black vocals and plenty of double bass drumming, nothing impressive but then, when the Gregorian vocals join the atmospheric keyboards there’s a good melodic atmospheric chanting.
“The Magellanic Clouds” is the typical awesome song that doesn’t have any lyrics or vocals. It doesn’t sound that different from the other ones, good electric guitar playing some figures over atmospheric keyboards and acoustic guitar, double bass drumming.
The song “Ragnarok” starts with growls and a distorted guitar riff, more like a guitar orientated song but there’s also a melodic part with plenty of atmospheric keyboards and clean singing, sounds quite impressive.