UMUR "The Plague of a Coming Age" is the 4th full-length studio album by Finnish black metal act October Falls. The album was released through Debemur Morti Productions in March 2013. October Falls was formed in 2001 and their early releases were dark acoustic neofolk, but from the "The Streams of the End (2007)" EP going forward, the band have incorporated black metal elements to their sound.

The music style on "The Plague of a Coming Age" is epic sounding atmospheric black metal with acoustic interludes thrown in. The band are well playing and the sound production is clear and powerful. The songwriting is pretty strong too, but it can be argued that there isn´t enough variation between tracks, which makes it a bit hard to distinguish between the various tracks. Most tracks feature more or less the same mid-paced stoic drum beat, raspy black metal type vocals and epic lead guitar themes. The tracks are atmospheric in nature and seldom offer up anything aggressive despite this being black metal. Melancholy is high on the list of emotions expressed here.

While I do feel that "The Plague of a Coming Age" is slightly one-dimensional in nature, it´s still arguably a quality release and if you´re hooked on this type of atmospheric, melancholic and epic sounding black metal, I´m sure you can look past the fact that not all tracks stand out from each other and as a consequence of that the flow of the album isn´t as dynamic as it could have been. A 3 - 3.5 star (65%) rating is warranted.

Vehemency On paper, October Falls sounds fabulous. Sorrowful folk / black metal with acoustic passages. Clear yet earthly production. Professional execution with every instrument. But still there is something that doesn't hook me, and I believe it has something to do with the OVERLY emotional flow of the album. There is no room for anything else but grandiosity after grandiosity, be it in the form of an acoustic interlude or a fast burst of black metal. Everything is bittersweet, epic.

This is the same problem that I see in every previous October Falls release too. A Collapse of Faith is the band's third metal release - in total there are 7 releases of which some are purely acoustic - and unfortunately I am disappointed by it. Surely it's beautiful and it's clear that lots of thought has been put into making this massive one-song album (divided into 3 parts). The third part, especially, is something I do enjoy, but the preceding two parts (both around 18 minutes) don't do much for me. Especially because during those parts there is that certain melody pattern that keeps repeating itself in various forms, and unluckily the melody is not above mediocre.

Lehto's airy screams are fitting and overall A Collapse of Faith isn't exactly bad, but it is... somehow uninspired, in the sense that I feel like I've heard these melodies already before. If you have enjoyed the previous outputs by October Falls you might like this too, but for me it consists of too familiar melodies, and a bit too exaggerated amount of beauty so that its effect is inverse, sounding dull in turn.