The Temptation Journey

To be honest I kind of expected this album to be better than it actually is. Do you ever get that feeling where you think an album's gong to blow you away without having heard anything at all? For some reason I expected FireLake to do that with their debut The Temptation Journey, but unfortunately it fell short. It has its moments, but an equal number of issues means that I can't truly appreciate this album.

Clean vocals can be used very effectively in melodeath if they're inserted in the right parts of the music and they're performed well enough to make an impact on the listener. The example that I will always point people towards is Infinite Tales, and I'll do it again here because Victoria Revko's vocals (particularly on Only the Beginning) are incredible and are used to maximum effect. That's what Alyona Korol has to compete with when she's performing across The Temptation Journey, and she just doesn't come close. Firstly, she doesn't even come into play until the fourth track, and considering there are a total of only ten that doesn't leave much time for her to show what she can do. Secondly, that lack of involvement from her is possibly a good thing as far as the album's overall quality is concerned. Normally I take to female vocalists as for some reason their voices are more captivating to me than their male counterparts. Alyona proves to be an exception to this rule. She's alright when she's not trying to make her voice powerful, but as soon as she does that (accounting for ninety per cent of her involvement across the album) she sounds like she's completely lost control and starts warbling away in the most horrendous way possible. FireLake would honestly have sounded better without her inclusion.

The growls are better, and although unspectacular I'd rather sit through them than listen to Alyona's wailing. They're the kind of harsh bark that you'd find in bands like Kalmah or Children of Bodom, and while I'd have liked it better if the growls had been lower and more guttural I don't completely dislike them. Indeed it probably works better with the rest of the band as they don't play riffs that are crushing enough for deeper growls to properly fit in with their work.

The guitars seem to play off of each other and spend most of their time playing different leads and melodies almost as if they're dueling for the entirety of The Temptation Journey. There's a high amount of technicality and they show that they're capable of crafting some incredible melodies, but as a result there's a little bit of oomph missing. That's why there's a lack of force in the music, as FireLake don't really have a rhythm guitarist. That job is left to the bassist (who also does the growls), and actually the bass is unusually audible. It's always good to hear something different like that, and Roman Gomeniuk plays well throughout. His bass is still left under everything else, but you can still notice that it's there somewhere because of the slight gapping in the guitars.

I find that some of the melodies also come together a bit awkwardly as a result of the two guitarists doing different things. Listen to 'Angel's Revelation' as an example (you'll also hear Alyona showing the good and bad that she can do). Around 1:40 the guitars pick up and the song is thrust into overdrive, but the guitars are doing completely different things from each other and it just doesn't work. The listener doesn't know where to direct their attention and it just sounds like the band members are having some kind of internal dispute. After about twenty or so seconds they sort themselves out and the music comes together pretty well, but it's those small sections that plague this record and make it hard to truly love.

While we're discussing 'Angel's Revelation', let's talk about the acoustic section that makes up the first half of that song. Now, I don't mind my acoustic sections. Some of the best parts of albums that I've reviewed have been the acoustic parts. But FireLake seriously overuse that idea here. On a ten track album, for four of the songs to start in the same way seems kind of overdone. I don't have a problem with the way that they play them, but it gets kind of tiring to hear almost half the songs start quietly and suddenly build to some kind of staccato and then progress no further for the rest of the song. I'd much rather that they weaved the acoustics in and out of the music rather than always placing them at the start, just to mix it up a little bit. They could have used it to great effect, but instead it's used purely as a simple mechanic to get the ball rolling.

The Temptation Journey isn't bad per se, but it's not great either. They have some good ideas and there are parts of the music that work very well, but ultimately there are just too many things that degrade this to being nothing more than mediocre. Perhaps worth checking out, but I'd recommend the stuff that the produced for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. over their debut album.