Mordab - Darker Than Grave (2008)

This demo starts out promising, with some nice acoustic guitars that get layered with some distorted guitars and drums. Then it sort of degrades into generic melodic death metal -- competently played and reasonably good, but it doesn't really make an impression, aside from two exceptions. The first is the terrible "Psychotic Depression". This is a pop song, with acoustic guitars and melodic vocals. It's even worse than a hair metal "power ballad". Bad, bad, bad. The second is the closer, "Ascenssion" (sic) which is a melodic doom number, akin to Swallow the Sun, and my favorite track here. They do a good job of creating and maintaining an atmosphere. I do have to give them some credit though -- they're from Iran. I hope they can continue to release music, as there is some potential here.

This release and their previous demo are available from their website.