Balance Between Lines

The concept at work here is somewhat original, putting together all instrumental music with an overt power/thrash tendency, and put a violin over top of it. Unfortunately this doesn’t travel much beyond being a gimmick, and what is actually going on is a somewhat competent variant on the bands like Iced Earth and Metallica were doing15 years before this, but without lyrics and a violin that chimes in every now and then to add an occasional textural additive. It’s interesting the first time you listen to it, but its novelty fades rather quickly and it is really hard to stay interested in it.

These riffs, which essentially are the sole focus of the entire album since no vocalist is present, have mostly been heard before. If you don’t want to go all the way back to the mid 80s metal scene for the original versions ala Fates Warning and Overkill, there’s always the mid 90s Gothenburg bands who did this sort of music, only they would usually include melodic overlays that were much easier to grab onto. But when listening to “Conquer” (which doesn’t even employ the violin), I can’t help but feel like I’m listening to an entire EP album of “Orion (The Hunter)”, but on a slightly lower skill level.

There’s a couple of different genres that this could be put under, but I don’t think progressive metal really fits here, even if we define it simply as doing something that is genre ambiguous in only the slightest way. Anyone who hears this can tell where it came from, and not have much trouble recognizing that there isn’t really anything new being done here apart from not having a singer. The band needs to either get a vocalist, start messing around with the format they have a little bit more, or at the very least, drop that goofy band name.