Back to Times of Splendor

There is something elusive in this album: Even when it's clear wich bands could be somewhat related to the sound of this one, at the time you recognice one of them things change and you are left in confusion again. Yes, this could be a consequence of Edge of Sanity's Crimson album, of both early and late Soilwork styles, of Opeth, if you look from enough distance. But it isn't just that, to make the whole puzzle of the music you need to add more and more pieces, as sometimes you discover a vocal line that you wouldn't be surprised to hear in a Vintersorg album (and then, at times, voices sung in a way that would fit in Tool...), a guitar riff that could be in a Devin Townsend album, another one that would make an Iced Earth fan stain his (or her) underwear, a few acoustical notes that reminds to the begining of some Blind Guardian old stuff. But those sudden flashes never last so long, giving you the idea that these guys had listened a lot of music, and let it run through their veins until they put it again as they like it to be, being this the consequence of a lot of things, and a proud heritage and consequence of the last 15 years of metal.

The music obviously and comfortable fits, at a first listen, into that wide and somewhat saturated "melodic death metal" box, if you aren't very exigent with the mellow and acoustical passages and you don't mind to have two songs with clear voices all the way. But you can't make this band fit near the thousand bands that came from Sweden: it's simple something else than them, more fresh, and a few times more original than the last Dark Tranquillity clone. The first thing one notices is the few songs that come here, and how long they are: Two songs are a few secons below the 5 minutes, but the other have an average time of almost 12 minutes. This, at first, makes one thing that this band must be something similar to Opeth, as at times they are (specially in how they like to persist in beautiful riffs, once the music reachs one of them). But once you dig into the songs you find different structures in the songs, different voices, a not so dim atmosphere as the one that Opeth use to roam. There are shadows and dark spaces through this music, but there is also a lot of anger, light and bright scenes.

Vurtox's voice is one of the hightlights of this album: He sings in a wonderful way, no matter what vocal style he uses. Voices appear more or less half of the times in a clean way, building beautiful melodies that fit perfectly between the melodic layers the guitars create, and the other half of the time they come growls that focus the strong part of the songs, usually reinforced by strong rythmic parts in the guitars (and by the way, something very interesting is the way how he sings the letter R: He seems all but german, when he does that). The guitars themselves sounds very good, both in the leads and the rythmic sections, and don't use to do fast solos, prefering to cut songs into acoustical sections or mellow parts that give a lot of diversity to the songs. Drums sound good enough, even if they aren't anything very spectacular, and there are also some soft keyboards, violins and computer effects (don't be scared, this isn't industrial, I swear) here and there, to underline certain passages.

But then again, there is something elusive in this album when you are listening to it, because it seems to twist into the cd player: The first times I listened to it, I was from time to time looking at the cd track number and at the track lenght, because some songs confuse you to the point that you can think they had ended when they are still going on, so you listen how the music fades, then comes a silence, then another thing starts and suddenly you find hearing again the first lines of the song. And when some songs are supossed to end, they do it in such a fine way that you find yourself listening the following track without realizing the track change. I can't finda better way to describe it than calling it laberynthine music, and maybe it's the best thing of this band.

Going song by song, And The Mirror Cracked starts justifying the melodic death label: A good melody, over a strong rythm. The song goes fast and hight, using growl bocals until the chorus, where one starts to think in Soilwork for a while. But after the chorus ends and the song goes on, when the solo would be expected, the music falls into a mellow part, with acoustic guitars, a piano and Vortex's clean voice all along, until the song seems to end, just to do a restart, fast and furious again, and to the end of the song, this time.

Fall is one of the two short songs of the album, and like the other "short" one it's all sung with a clean voice, at times surrounded by acoustical guitars and great choruses. Being shorter, it doesn't have as many changes as their longer sisters have, but still manages to have a cute solo that could had been on Dark Tranquillity's Projector.

Then here it comes Alone I Stand in Fires. Some clean distorted vocals dig the path until the last line becomes one of those screams that make you hurt your throath when you are singing along. Those screams appear later in a part of the chorus, creating one of the best parts of the album. This song manages to find more chances to change the path, even when it never slows down so much. The song ends in a quiet part from where the next song, Back to Times of Splendor, takes off, using a violin that is soon followed by the usual fast and strong guitars.

This song again uses growls and have some furious guitar passages (remember that, above, about Iced Earth? Just listen to the end of the parts where the violin appears), to emply clean vocals over the choruses. The song goes then though slow parts that go merging slowly into strong sections once again... and have maybe the soft parts of all the album, just to make them explode again when it's time to run again.

A Day by the Lake is the softest song in the album, where clean vocals and acoustic guitars (sometimes well mixed with electric guitars) appear again to tell a beautiful story that doesn't manage to hide a bitter taste, and works very well as a relax point between the previous masterpiece and the ending track.

And remember about Blind Guardian? The Quest for Tanelorn begun in the same shape that The Sleep of Restless Hours does, but then again Disillusion quickly changes things to make you clear that you aren't listening to the power metal of their fellow countrymen. This is the longest song of the album, and concludes showing all the weaponry that the band had brightly used before in the previous tracks: A quick start, rythms that go from frantic speeds to jumpy ones, slower choruses, and a jump into silence that could make a new listener thing that it was over, just to delight him with a few more minutes of music that could be considered as an instrumental outro for the album.