Band:	Autumn
Album:	Cold Comfort
Style:	Symphonic rock, Symphonic metal
Release date:	November 2011

01. The Scarecrow
02. Cold Comfort
03. Black Stars In A Blue Sky
04. Retrospect
05. Alloy
06. End Of Sorrow
07. Naeon
08. Truth Be Told (Exhale)
09. The Venamoured
10. Changes For The Bitter [limited edition digipak bonus]
11. The Mute (Inhale) [limited edition digipak bonus]

Having a girl in your band in the hard-rock/metal world is a strange thing. While it's stopped being groundbreaking ages ago, most record promo sheets try and speak otherwise. It's actually become sort of self-defeating, I mean, much of this promotion uses euphemistic language to basically say "Look! This band has a chick, but that doesn't matter, because she can rock out like the boys can!" A bit hypocritical isn't it? Constantly reminding us of the presence of a female, yet trying to convince us that the quality is the same (or better) despite this. Well, oddly enough, Autumn has to be one of the first female-fronted bands I've reviewed that doesn't use a female front-(wo)man as a marketing point, yet her voice is the most conducive part of this album.

Cold Comfort is a sleepy atmospheric rock album that has an extreme emphasis on melody, yet it's given enough of a guitar-based edge to hold appeal to the metal/hard-rock crowd. It's a gentle, dreary album. Honestly, it's probably one of the tighter bands I've come across in the past little while. In a sense, you could say it is pretty stripped down; the songs just roll in one direction, the keyboards and guitars blend into each other almost in perfect balance, while the melancholic vocals step through to become the centrepiece.

There's no punches pulled, wrenches thrown in, or curve balls thrown. Yeah, they really know how to write their brand of music with conviction, but without any distinct changes from song to song, this album can feel like it's hours longer than it actually is. Though, given the right mindset, enjoying this trip from start to finish still does not come without it's flaws. The musicians seem to lack confidence in some areas, maybe this is coming from a metal fan, approaching this with totally the wrong mindset, but it would have been nice to see the guitars take the forefront more frequently. There's enough interesting riffs, but aside from the solos, the guitars rarely step in front of the keyboards when they should. The second issue being the layered vocals that were used at a number of points. Marjan Welman has an incredible voice, it's maybe not of the over-the-top mind-blowing operatic variety, but they're distinct in their own gentle way, her vocals consistently operating on single track probably would have been a little more moving.

Ignoring how samey Cold Comfort comes across by the end, it's a pretty decent album if you're interested in some nice, rainy-day dreary atmo-rock.