A Flame to the Ground Beneath

Lost Horizon is an interesting case. Near the peak of the turn-of-the-millennium power metal renaissance comes another act from Sweden that drops a debut of real promise, 'Awakening the World', and a follow-up under two years later, before disappearing. A lot of reviewers and fans at the time of this album's release were a bit blinded by this band's potential, though, and failed to hear some of the disjointedness to their work. Which isn't to say this album isn't good, or that Lost Horizon wasn't a very promising act. Both of those statements are true. But 'A Flame to the Ground Beneath' isn't quite deserving of all the hype.

First things first: the conventional wisdom about the singer is right; he is supremely talented. His voice is exceptionally smooth and controlled and is definitely one of the best power metal voices of the 00s. The synths provide a sort of Nordic-trademarked icy atmosphere and sometimes even are the center of attention, but never feel like they dominate. Every song here has high-quality, highly melodic guitar work, and the guitars usually get the superior melodies.

There's really only six songs here, so each one really needs to count. I'm not categorically opposed to interludes and intro tracks, but you've got to do them right, and albums like 'A Flame to the Ground Beneath' give them a bad name: these are lazy, boring, and, not being labeled as intro/outro/interlude tracks, arguably attempt to deceive someone buying the album (it would have been bought exclusively in physical form when it came out) that there are more songs on the album than there really are. Would it have been so difficult to create some beautiful synth-driven atmospheres? Instead there is just ambient mush for three minutes for outro track 'Deliverance', for instance. So lazy and boring!

At any rate, the songwriting for the longer tracks (8+ minutes) is a significant step up from those from 'Awakening the World', and everything here is full of musical ideas. But despite the singer's magnificent voice, he is often handed surprisingly boring vocal melodies, requiring the guitars to do heavier lifting than they ought to. It's clear that they are trying to write catchy hooks to go along with everything else, but they just aren't really up to the job. Their melodies are more rhythmically interesting than most power metal acts', however, and aren't bad or boring -- just underwhelming relative to the high quality of the guitars, synths, and, in an even bigger surprise, drums. Yes, power metal fans -- here is an unambiguously power metal act with good drums! The engaging drum work provides surprising and surprisingly consistent elevation to this album.

If only the songwriting was a little bit more focused. Not one of these songs has a pop structure or is chorus-driven, which are usually two hallmarks of these styles. But if you're going to incline out toward prog influences, you need to do it right. To my mind, the star track of this album is 'Think Not Forever', which does almost everything right and is one of the most effortless-sounding songs Lost Horizon recorded. At 6 minutes, this is actually one of the shortest songs on this record -- the shortest, 'Again Will the Fire Burn', is underrated and has some unnerving vocal and synth lines. The best of the longer pieces is 'Cry of a Restless Soul', which never loses momentum, features authentic self-reflective lyrics, and as a whole generally encapsulates the manic highs and depressive lows of the life of the artist and seeker. There's a lot here to take in, and you need to spend a little time with these songs to rightly get into them.

The only song that goes beyond ten minutes, 'Highlander', unfortunately, is bloated as hell, with obnoxious chanting ('Na-na-na-na-na' -- seriously, I'm not f**king with you), a preponderance of spoken-word sections -- which should be used very sparingly -- and repetitive melodic ideas. If I could trim about five minutes of fat off of this song, I think I'd have something solid and serviceable, but this band does not know how to say 'Enough' or 'No' and we end up with these overcooked tracks instead. 'Pure' is an interesting choice for an opener, with relatively subtle melodies and nothing obviously hooky, yet full of passion and energy. It's also representative of what's to come: an album that even more fully embraces the prog tendencies of the debut, yet somehow is even more purist in its power metal tropes than last time, especially in the vocals.

One general problem: this album is oddly devoid of riffs. There is just too much going on here too much of the time when there should be something anchoring the song, giving it a center of gravity. Therefore much of the time my enjoyment of this album feels overly abstract, like it's something I 'should' like, on paper, something I 'appreciate' but don't fully love. That's definitely not the case all the time -- I really love 'Think Not Forever', for instance. But it's true that even on the longer songs I enjoy, like 'Cry of a Restless Soul', it doesn't pack the same visceral wallop as the longer songs of bands like Epica and Sonata Arctica or even Power Quest, for me. But that says a lot about my inclinations within power metal, I suppose; many who love Lost Horizon love them precisely because they are not much like those bands.

At any rate, this is important listening for power metal fans, and I think there's a lot of interest here for metal fans generally. But this is also the album's problem: because it is trying to be too many things at once, it rarely becomes great at any individual aspect of what it does, even though it's a solid record as a whole and even has a distinctive atmosphere and identity. Look at each of the individual parts, though, except for the vocals, and there's a little less 'there' there than first meets the ear.

I wish Lost Horizon had continued to record together; their third or fourth album could have ended up being a real masterpiece. There's a lot of ambition and talent on this album and I think they had it in them to make something really great. But on this album, they weren't there yet; they were still a very good, promising young act. Nonetheless, there's still a lot of high-quality stuff here to recommend, and I'd pick up their third album in a heartbeat were it ever to appear.