Don't know a whole lot about this band other than fact that they are from Latvia, and are apparently the first ever doom/death band to hail from that country. I know just as little about the Latvian metal scene, but Frailty are making a good case for Latvian doom with their ambitious debut album on Solitude that came out earlier this year. If you're a regular C-Blaster, you've noticed that we've been picking up prettyu much everything that the Russian label Solitude has put out...their taste in European death/doom is pretty damn great, and I have yet to be disappointed with any of the albums that we've gotten from them. Frailty certainly brings the death and the doom with nine songs of mostly slow, typically crushing epic deathdoom that takes it's influence from the classics like Anathema, My Dying Bride, Mourning Beloveth, and especially Katatonia with the gloomy, sweeping melodies that infuse Frailty's huge chugging riffs. The album opens with a menacing wave of blackened kosmiche synthesizers that sweep into the first song "I Know Your Pain", and from there the songs move from epic doom that is fused with lush celestial keyboards, to faster death metal parts with flurries of fierce double-bass drumming and chunky double picked riffing, but some of the songs also drift off into these pretty little passages of spacey fx-coated guitars and elegant piano that break up the heaviness. The vocals are for the most part deep, gutteral deathgrowls that are monstrous enough for the huge riffage and pounding mid-paced drumming, but where some of you might take issue with Frailty's music is when the clean vocals kick in. In the first half of the album, the deep, Gothy male singing is usually relegated to the background where it backs up the deep death growls, but later in Lost Lifeless Lights, the clean vocals become more prominent and out in front, alternating with the death metal vocals on songs like "Graphics In Ebony" and especially "A Summer To Die"...on songs like these, the singing is really dramatic and off-key, and whenever it appears it sounds like a Latvian chanson singer just took the mic in hand, a bottle of Riga balsams hanging out of his other hand, crooning dramatically over the dreamy, Pink Floydian guitars, crushing metallic chords and drifting heavenly keyboards. I think these guys are great, slightly folk-damaged but super heavy and full of amazing melodic riffs that take me back to the glory days of epic Euro deathdoom, and if you've got a taste for crushing, melodic, spacey, folk-tainted Slavic death/doom, then I'm betting you'll be all over this.