Hailing from France you would expect The Oath to fall into the more avant-garde, abstract form of black metal that tries to stab you in the ears with an obsidian dagger crafted from Satan's toenails but instead this is a little more the symphonic, gothic route with a fair whack of melodeath sensibilities thrown in. So Dani Filth's toenails instead.

Opener End of The Lines is basically your straight up symphonic BM song: fast, lots of keys and some random clean singing thrown in for good measure. The growling vocals stand out due to them being more death metal-esque in delivery and pretty clear too, but the song sounds too airy and has no real feeling about it at all. It's a problem that spreads to the rest of the album, the production has left it sounding quite sterile and the keyboards are far too thin sounding for this sort of music. The strings lack body which again adds to the lack of gravitas the the music should be seeking. Embraced starts with an interesting, oddly happy, section before going all power metal for a few seconds inbetween the intro and first verse and then we're back into the same old rut that happened in the first song. The chorus is similar to early Sirenia more than anything else (at least it sounds like something from their better period) but it's not really throat grabbing and demanding. For the third track Alone I Roam you could just take my comments about the End of The Lines, subtract the clean vocals and add the keyboardist pitchbending strings and behold! My opinion is formed. It's a little more energetic than the two before it which is a plus and the chorus is actually not too shabby either, it calls to mind fellow Frenchmen Anorexia Nervosa. Way to Nowhere shows that the band seems to have borrowed keyboard sounds from Lost Horizon, but after the intro it's pretty generic, dull stuff.

Despite my comments about the vocals being one of the stronger elements of the band it's the instrumental track Only that finally makes me pay attention to the band beyond the first few bars. It's fairly gothy black metal stuff so it's not like there's anything that's massively different from the other tracks either, but it seems to have a lot more energy and atmosphere to it compared to the rest which just places it above them. Unfortunately the high can only really last for so long as Watch Me Bleed brings things back down rather rapidly to start with, but once the clean vocals hit the song opens up more as the instruments are given more room outside of just blasting and tremolo picking away. Shame the whole song doesn't evolve from that. Sitting through Impossible Cure I'm mainly picking out the lyrics, and I'm noticing that they're your angsty, metalcore type of drivel that pours out the mouth of teenagers moping over that girl they saw for two seconds and fell in love with but can never see again due to her being a dude or something, but my main point is they're bad. The music's nothing special, but I've stated that often enough that you should've expected it. For the sake of completion: White Fields follows the same pattern as the first and third song and the closing track I am Nothing started off promising but doesn't do much until a little keyboard interlude hits to bring in the outro which is fairly pleasant to listen to.

My issues with this album are two fold. Firstly the production does it absolutely no favours. It's weak, sterile and makes The Oath sound like a squeaky clean pop band. Black metal ius supposed to have either a slightly rough sound or completely over the top and bombastic one. This has neither. Probably more important than that is my second issue: The music's just not interesting. The songs all sound far too similiar to one another and as you may have noticed reading through the review the further into the album I got the more bored I became. Listening to music shouldn't be a chore, and there sheer dearth of feeling here gives you no real reason to stick with it. Skip this and be glad I listened to it for you.