MORTIIS — The Smell of Rain (review)

MORTIIS — The Smell of Rain album cover Album · 2001 · Metal Related Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
Set aside any preconceptions you might have about Mortiis' music from his solo career up to this point. It's here that he abandoned the strange, lo-fi outsider art Dungeons & Dragons soundtracks that he had turned into a subgenre of its own in the 1990s and shifts to a somewhat generic sounding but surprisingly competently executed electronic goth rock style. After this album the "Mortiis" project would become a band affair, and backed by a competent set of musicians Mortiis is actually quite successful at making the transition to this musical style.

Is he a bit like Marilyn Manson in a troll mask? Well, perhaps, and certainly his surprisingly wimpy vocals and lyrics make him sound like a self-pitying teenager, but everyone feels self-pitying sometimes and this album certainly resonates with that. In addition, there's an interesting thematic strand running through the lyrics which suggests that The Smell of Rain is a concept album about the godlike entity ruling over fantasyland that Mortiis sang about in his earlier career, having returned to reality and lost his Dungeon Master powers and having to deal with being a grown-ass man in the mundane world, which is rather fun to keep track of. Not what I'd call a classic album, but an interesting one certainly, though to be honest it's a little too generic to be anything other than a footnote in the history of the genre that Mortiis was trying to work his way into here.
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Warthur wrote:
more than 2 years ago
I think the distinction is that King Diamond - and for that matter, Alice Cooper and any band that uses corpsepaint - is pretty clearly wearing makeup, which is a fairly universal sign of "this is play-acting, I'm just having a bit if fun here". Whereas Mortiis' mask is the sort of thing you put on a Lord of the Rings extra to try and convince the viewer that this is an actual orc, so it sort of plays into the whole "wait, does he actually believe he's a troll?" thing that Mortiis had going for much of his early career.
UMUR wrote:
more than 2 years ago
He he I saw Mortiis live once. The show was as far as I remember pretty decent, but that troll mask...completely ridiculous :-). I don´t know why his particular custome feels more ridiculous that say King Diamond´s, which I´ve always liked, but it does...

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