Are You Not Entertained?

After 13 years of nothing, Dyecrest releases their third album, Are You Not Entertained?. After listening to all of their music multiple times over I can safely say that they have not changed their quality one bit. Just like The Way of Pain and This Is My World, Are You Not Entertained? is still a flop. This time they took the amazing future Everfrost vocalist Mikael Salo up front while the vocalists from previous albums were shuffled to the back and delegated to the role of backup vocalist. However, the bland, lifeless guitars returned for this album and it shows that they are resistant to any change outside of vocalists.

The main problem with this album is that it's inconsistent. It bounces around between sounds and stories that just don't work. There's no power in this power metal, just a mess of keyboards and guitars desperately trying to work in unison while they horribly misuse Salo's voice and pair it with even worse backup vocals. Yes, it's his first ever professional album. It's only natural that someone in their debut would sound a little out of their depth. Salo is light years out of his depth in this album. He will eventually find his sound with other bands like Everfrost and Metal de Facto but this will be a stain on his musical resume.

The production for the album is good. The vocals and the guitars are pretty crisp and clear with no very noticeable mixing issues outside of the drums being hidden in the back a little bit occasionally. Despite it being crisp and clear, it only highlights the problems with the album. The guitars are grating to say the least. They're tuned to an unpleasant degree to where it sounds like someone went into a sound editing program and distorted the already distorted guitars of Nibiru Ordeal's "Gone With the Wind" further. This problem is most noticeable in the guitar solos for the third and fourth songs in this album "The Stage is Set" and "No Fear". There's barely any rhythm to it and it feels like it repeats itself for eternity of annoying loops before slipping into a generic sequence that anyone that isn't missing an arm can play. Synths and pianos are thrown in there to remind people that this album is supposed to be power metal and not bland fluff metal.

I've talked about the vocals a lot but haven't said too much about them until now. They're bad. Mikael Salo's voice is clearly for anthem-like songs with strong backup vocals to give his voice a little bit of extra oomph. A good example of what he's really good at is "Actraiser" and "Winterider" by Everfrost where his vocal talent truly shines. The attempts to make him sing outside of what his vocal range allows him to sound good in is splattered all over the album and it makes it hard to listen to without cringing. In some songs he gets to such a high, squeal-like pitch that makes it hard to discern lyrics and just hard to listen to in general. The backup vocals do not help whatsoever either, like in the song "First Born Angel". They kind of exist, not helping out Salo in any capacity whatsoever. It feels like he made lead vocals and the band scrambled to attempt to make something that went with it and it flat out doesn't work. It would just be better without them.

One final, quick note is the sixth track on the album, "Breaking News". There is absolutely no reason for it to be on there. It doesn't contribute to the album both musically or songwriting wise. It's confusing as well. The track is supposed to be a fictional news report about three terrorists inside a home surrounded by police on a track that doesn't have very much to do with any of it. It's like they saw that they had twelve tracks on the album and said that they needed at least one track that didn't need to exist on an album that really shouldn't exist at all due to it's quality. At 43 seconds long, it's a minor inconvenience but it still makes me wonder why it was even thought of in the first place.

In conclusion, this album is not worth your time. Since this album is continuing the Dyecrest trend of mediocre music, I would say that Dyecrest in general is not worth your time.

Notable Songs: N/A