Violet Cries

Violet Cries is an intriguing collection from a young band that already seems poised to build away from its influences. [Feb. 2011, p. 71]

It's an intriguing, powerful sound, and due to the subsequent nightmares caused, I now look forward to sending Esben both my psychiatrist's and dry cleaner's bills.

Esben and the Witch sure can make a racket, but parsing out the minimal substance is the real challenge. Better than Salem? Definitely. A perfect debut? Not quite.

Their debut positions itself somewhere sonically between the avant-gardism of These New Puritans and Siouxsie And The Banshees at their most stridently gothic. [Feb. 2011, p. 114]

Violet Cries, one of the more anticipated debut albums of the year, isn't a let down, but it's a difficult album to get a grasp on.

Violet Cries isn't an easy album to get into, and it may well prove too impenetrable for the casual listener. They may not signal a Goth revival, but there's enough promise here to justify keeping an eye on this Brighton trio.

Despite a tendency to drift formlessly, there's true beauty in some of their desolate soundscapes, which get eerier as the album crawls along.

Named after a grim Danish fairy tale, Esben and the Witch pursues a narrow course on their first album, Violet Cries, a morose, pitch-black update of the '80s dark-wave template.

Violet Cries is broadly, nebulously goth, with very little to distinguish the band from their peers and forebears.

The pattern of temper tantrums and sulks that makes up Violet Cries eventually begins to feel like a substitution for songwriting. It's difficult not to long for the more mature band that Esben And The Witch will hopefully become.

Other groups have approached the issue of originality by genre-blending; but in the case of Esben and the Witch, it is their very faith that ensures that the hollowness one feels while listening has a doubled quality, reflected not only in content but also in experience, leaving one with the ominous aftertaste of a doppelgänger encounter.