Long Live Death provide a great example of dishonest music, of a music born from adolescent preoccupations with the occult that never go anywhere, but instead stay the product of an adolescent mind. David (Late) Tibet, despite his initially shocking voice, sounds convincing and absolutely believable.
Tibet's tortures, screams, and often times strange lyrical obsessions end up feeling warm because honesty is an undeniable facet of his work. After some time there is no denying that the voices, lyrics, and ideas on all of his albums are deeply felt demons and revelations that he exorcises through music. Despite an elegant and, at times, wholly beautiful musical background, the lead vocalist for Long Live Death sounds as though he's preaching his ideas instead of relating them. His demons and ideas sound like someone else's ideas, ideas that he's yet to understand completely but tries to relay to everyone willing to listen. The subject matter, while not unfamiliar, seems simplified for the audience so that the band can sing to the audience as though they were all children. After a short amount of time this becomes annoying, stealing the music of its dark grandeur and turning it into a lame "gothic" accumulation of acoustic instruments and "spooky" Theremin use. The band has been rumored to be part of a kind of commune and, judging from the photograph inside the liner notes and songs like "Join Us" and "Praise," it's a commune of some religious interest. Knowing this somehow spoils the music more than the vocals do, it cheapens the sometimes epic guitar parts and spacious sounds, turning them into a structure more akin to a haunted house than an ancient chapel or holy place. Instead of letting the music and lyrics come together to create an unsettling or esoteric atmosphere, Long Live Death opt to force it out of their instruments and voices. It sounds cheap at times and nice at others, but it's hard to get past that voice, it sounds as though it belongs in a high school drama class, part of a young man's voice who hasn't yet mastered making Shakespeare's language convincing or natural for himself, much less his audience. An instrumental version of this record would be nice. All of the strings used on the record come together nicely, but they can't save Bound to the Wheel from sounding fake or from appearing too ornate and excessively contrived.
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