Delusion

This is more like it. When I look for gothic/symphonic metal, this is more what I'd expect (and hope) to find. Evolvent are a relatively new band from France (not somewhere I've really looked to for metal), and despite a rather tried and tested appearance to the onlooker, they are actually quite good.

For people craving the doom/death metal that they used to play, that notion has quite clearly gone out of the window by the point of this album (aside from in Blade - we'll come to that later). The guitars are toned down to the point that they almost can't even be considered metal (although in this case that isn't actually a bad thing) and the drums are also somewhat lacking. What really makes the genre that this band plays are the vocals and melodies created by the keyboard and guitar, and I can say that those two things have been done well.

If we're going to split those two things separately, the vocals are the better part of it. Occasionally the guitars are prone to making noises that sound out of tune and the keyboard has a tendency to be drowned out by other things, and as a result the vocals quite clearly steal the spotlight. I don't know who she is or why she only stayed with the band for this one release, but Johanna Manto has a far better voice than plenty of other woman I've heard. Her range is excellent as well, even if she doesn't go right the way down to death metal growls.

The tracks that left the best impressions on me were Under a Bloodless Sky, Refugee and Empty Shades. It's kind of hard to pick out exactly what makes them better than the others, but they just have that something that the others lack. Occasionally this can be put down to poor qualities in other songs, like the guitar in How Come or some random male vocals that are pretty much just spoken on the title track. In all honesty though, there is a noticeable lack of anything that's painful to listen to on here.

Blade, as previously mentioned, seems to have a bit of death/doom influence in it. There are growled male vocals and the music is generally pretty slow (not too much more so than any of the other songs, mind you), but that's about it. I guess it's slightly heavier than the other songs too, but not very noticeably. For the most part the female vocals are present and the driving point is the guitar/keyboard combo with their melodies rather than purely heavy guitar riffs.

Ah, if only I'd found this band sooner. This is a really great effort, and I look forward to hearing their next work. It's sad that the vocals won't be the same as on this record, but I'm sure they can find a fitting replacement if they search long and hard enough. I really hope that they did search for the best option, as it would be a shame for a band of this caliber to fall to the rating of just average.