Beyond The Dream is a Finnish dark metal band which was founded in 2001 and started writing songs in 2005. Sin Against The Sinners is their self-released debut album. We received a nice promo sheet which looks really professional. Of course a nice promo sheet doesn´t say jack about the music, but in nowadays download driven society I am pleasantly surprised to receive this kind of material, instead of some MP3 files.

The music of Beyond The Dream can be described as a mix between melodic black metal, a hint of gothic because of the atmosphere and even some doom elements can be found. All is larded with a thick blanket of keys, something that’s quite common in this genre.

And that’s exactly the problem with this album, everything sounds too familiar. The music isn’t badly executed, but never when listening to this album I had the feeling of “wow, that’s nice!”. The songs all sound very average. They don’t come up with something spectacular or cleaver bridges or that kind of stuff. The music just rolls along and bores the hell out of me.

Again, there are some nice musicians at work here, but they really need to learn how to write memorable songs. A nice album for their families and friends and they could even land a gig here and there, but they have to work on the song writing. If they get that on the same level as their promotional sheets, then I would be happy to review their next album!