If you already read the interview I did with Karsten few weeks ago, you already know that the new album, DESERTED DREAMS, is a sort of bridge that link Penitent's past to his future. Forgot the latest sounds of "Songs of despair" and its black metal attitude and tune yourself with the old Penitent sounds; the ones with martial marches and apocalyptic atmospheres. As Karsten confirmed into the interview, the ten instrumental tracks paint a sort of hypothetical path where each track is a step of the voyage. The slow rhythms of the tracks, the strings and the percussion gives to the whole work a sort of solemn atmosphere and by listening "Beyond the sun" or "Meeting our fate" it seems that we are taking part to an heroic venture. It seems a little fantasy described this way, but if you try to put this CD while you put into your DVD the scenes of the Lord Of The Ring trilogy, the ones where the ogre hordes attack the barricades, you'll notice that this music fit it very well. The only thing I haven't appreciated is that the CD sounds too compressed and I don't know if this is what Karsten reached. Maybe it gives an additional dreamy touch to the result, but it seems also that he used low bitrate samples...