Hello Temple. Today I bring to you TINE and their album "The Forest Dreams of Black". This relatively new band from Pennsylvania, United States was formed in 2011. Releasing their debut album in 2015, they took those 4 years to perfect their craft. The result is mesmerising but I feel that it lacks the necessesary punch to be a bit more memorable.

It opens up on "Enter the Black Forest". This introduction is fantastic, it builds up from a wind into a guitar solo, and slowly all the other instruments come into play one after the other to give us a taste of what is to come.

The tone of "Horrors at Antioch" is very dark and but also very plain. This is one of the songs I would have liked to have a bit more punch. The melody is griping, but the beat doesn't change from start to finish of this 6 minute song. It does succeed in giving you a beautifully dark and symphonic atmosphere though.

"Lord is Self" comes off slightly better; it brings a bit more to the table in terms of melody than the previous song. The vocals also are a lot more involved. The same cannot be said about "The Darkest Premonition", as there are no vocals at all, though the guitar riffs and compulsive drums are impressive. There is also another instrumental song before the end of the album "The Key to Forbidden Knowledge", which too fits the aforementioned description, and is also quite mesmerising even without any vocals.

"Encounter with the Shadow People", "The Crusade of Dracul" and "Herein Lies the Crooked Elm" all fall into the same category as the second song. It is kind of hard to differentiate the songs in the end. The beats are similar and they all bring a veyr dark atmosphere. This album seems like a long DIMMU BORGIR song, with similar tempos from start to finish and dark, gritty vocals from Count Murmur.

It is a great album, but I doubt that I would put it on repeat. In the end, I've had my fill with just a few listens. It is still one you might want to add to your collection if you are a fan of the genre, but in my humble opinion, it's not a 'must-have'.