The Grand Masquerade

This is fairly poor even by Echoes Of Silence standards; it seems it took Leviticai a long time to learn to really work his way around his programs, so the music on 'The Grand Masquerade' comes off as underdeveloped, simplistic, and trite. Later Echoes Of Silence has a lot more going on, and while I'd hesitate to call it particularly good, at least it's more interesting than this. I've never been particularly fond of the band's sound, but my knowledge of their discography leads me to believe this is one of the poorer works in their rather extensive catalog.

The gimmick of this band, if you haven't heard, is that Leviticai uses all MIDI instruments instead of actual guitars, and it shows. Even the vocals are distorted beyond recognition. The sound quality is terrible; everything sounds incredibly synthetic as these aren't even 'good' MIDI guitars being used. It's rare for me that I can't look past production in my appraisal of an album, but this is one of those cases: everything sounds so incredibly cold and flat, and since this is clearly in no way a 'cyber' band, that can't be really used as a defense.

Composition on this releases from relatively mediocre to poor. There's just not much going on; maybe one guitar line, some programmed drums, and vocals at a stretch, and the thinness of the songs becomes highly obvious as soon as there's no blasting; since there's no real sustain on the guitars, the silence between notes is massive and obvious, preventing the listener even more from getting involved in the music. The melodic sense here is, admittedly, a rather unique combination of Victorian-style gothic and black metal, but I think it's more unique because these are the melodies that most other bands would throw out for being too cheesy. The whole thing comes off as being sort of a parody of itself despite the clearly serious intentions behind the music.

Echoes Of Silence does have some marginally worthwhile releases but this really isn't one of them. If you want to know what the fuss is about, you'd be better off investigating one of the band's later albums because there's really nothing to see here.