Suffer Our Pleasures

Tarot is not a band I was familiar with, and honestly I usually sort of fear cds on the Metal Blade label because they are usually just too heavy for me. And while I wouldn’t describe Tarot as anything other than heavy, they managed to infuse enough melody into their album to hold my interest. Although I’m not crazy about the singer’s voice, the music is really good and more than half of the songs are too. Among the best were the very dark Convulsions, and the surprisingly catchy Undead Son. But despite the overall heaviness of those songs and the rest of the album, the song that really caught my attention was the album closer, Painless, an acoustic Tantric style rocker with a subtly addictive sound that kept me coming back. -- Scott