In Age And Sadness began their career under the moniker of Sohaitan, in the winter of 2002. Not entirely satisfied with the band name and after the replacement of several members, drummer Niels proposed to change the name. Their music also changed from old school death metal to doom/death metal.

When you say doom/death metal the first band that pops into your mind would be My Dying Bride, followed by Opeth (at least for the death part) and indeed there are a lot of similarities. For instance the occasional acoustic guitar parts are Opeth-ish as well as the clean vocals. The band luckily is honest enough to name those two bands as their greatest influences and I have to say that In Age And Sadness’ case it is most certainly not a cheap rip off.

All four tracks on this first demo are interesting to listen to, they have just the right atmosphere that makes you want to listen to them and the replay button was pushed repeatedly when writing this review.

Of course there are always things that can be improved: I’m not too fond of the clean vocals and the drum sound isn’t that good either but the positive things clearly dominate.

As mentioned before, the atmosphere is really fitting, the grunt of singer/bass player Pepijn is as low as it should be and the intro to the fourth track “Vagrant Thoughts” is great. Overall the pace of the songs is really slow (as should be expected with this kind of music) but the occasional tempo change keeps things interesting.

Last thing to say is that I owe the band an apology. I’ve received the CD months ago but due to several factors the review just didn’t get written. I’ve listened to it regularly though and I certainly see a future for this young band on a label like Firebox.