The gorgeous artwork of _After_ greets the listener with a mysterious facade of dark, deep shades of golden-brown and enigmatic Pompeii-like frescoes. The exquisite butterfly on the cover hints at you with hidden secrets and obscurities... and then you get this mixed-bag of average quality melodic blackened doom with raspy Russian-sung vocals, drenching in keyboards and a sea of guitar harmonies.

Raventale, other than rare aesthetics, does not bring forth anything new to the style. The melodies are fine, the mood is there, the atmosphere is right, but Raventale's pitfall is the songwriting. Raventale treads familiar roads, and echoes, while doing so, an abundance of bands. The riffs all over this album are generic, the songwriting evidently unoriginal.

_After_ is an extremely melodic album, housing in its midst exquisite sounds, but this fact also robs the music some of its weight and effectiveness, and even though the artist behind the band had apparently strove to lend his creation a certain ominous heaviness -- what with these brutal rasps and an abysmal, down-tuned, chunky guitar sound -- the music eventually turned out to be too tame and polite to generate certain emotions, if at all.

Long waves of melancholic strumming and lush keyboards can't ultimately bridge the gap between music that makes a stand, causes impact, leaves the listener scarred -- and _After_, whose sheer beauty does not hide the absence of real substance, lack of ideas or power this album suffers from.

Beautiful music -- yes, but empty of ideas and ultimately poor in genuine emotions.