A Flame to the Ground Beneath

As the title above suggests this album is one overwhelming, unique and stratospherically powerful musical experience that will sink into your subconscious eternally, not only because it's reinforced with revolutionary powerful vocals and approach to the style but also thanks to the authenticity, belief and dedication that communicates through every track on its own. From the above-average production to the songwriting it will leave you with that special WTF? feeling where you will find yourself wondering what has just happened.

This is the band's second album released in 2003 under the "Music For Nations label". For the first time the band has under the leadership of the songwriter and the lead guitarist, Wojtek Lisicki, introduced dedicated keyboard player along with the additional rhythm guitar section that now makes the Lost Horizon lineup complete with 6 members altogether. This has obviously had a greater productional value on the bands progress not only in the sense of creating more progressive and instrumentally more fulfilled LP but in making the bands image, sound and charisma more versatile and capable for the live performances. To make our hungry ears fulfilled we have 7 full tracks coupled with an atmospheric intro and outro that makes the experience of a listener more galvanized towards an actual spiritually charged experience.

Lyrics are intellectual, sometimes complex and they'll be incomprehensible to most people with influences from the early Manowar era, all time Virgin Steele etc. Most of the lyrical writing deal with the highly introspective, spiritual, occult-like themes and higher ideals in philosophical sense of individual against collective, self-empowerment and freedom, so you won't be bothering with them as an impulsive "I listen only to the music" type of a listener.

Wojtek's guitar work is unmatched for the progressive power metal genre if you want to label them since officially they don't prefer "power" behind their name, they like to be considered as a true ethereal heavy metal band, outside the mentioned Manowar's meaning. Riffs, solos and their originality are unmatched for the most power lead guitarists, they literally "speak" dozens of emotional moods and anthems of a warrior individual, making at least 50% of the whole band with the respect to Christian whose drums ripped the devil himself with his double bass, speed and precision. Keyboards were a great addition to the debut, but here we have a dedicated rhythm/melody power maker, Attila Publik whose cooperation with Wojtek was obviously tight, even if Wojtek was a primary songwriter.

Highlight of both albums and the band, besides original and highly aspirational approach along with the philosophical and intellectual expression, is the vocalist, Daniel Heiman. His vocals are still being unmatched for the most heavy metal and extreme style singers since I've first heard him. You have vocalists like Kelly Sundown Carpenter, Iuri Sanson, Midnight, who are in some sense, at least somewhat similar in the timbre or the scream placement technique, false-folds use in reinforced power screams etc. but none of them had such naturally technical impact in being consistent, effortless, convincing (e.g. no falsetto or the over-lightness through time that would make you think he's finally shown some limits) and still so raspy (means that his muscles are still elastic and relaxed) in the highest ranges (e.g. B5-C6). Kelly is close but hearing the Outworld and Beyond Twilight performances in detail, they are great, still nowhere near astonishingly powerful and pipe-supported as Heiman demonstrated vocally on both Lost Horizon albums. His screams are far more powerful and convincing. You can't give him enough credit, standard of his own.

The track that stands out is 'Highlander (The One)' very popular(judging by the view counts) even on the YouTube mostly because of the last sing-a-long 'WOAH' part at the end of the song. It's a ~12min long epic (except "Cry Of A Restless Soul") filled with atmospherical, spiritual and emotional changes where the band explodes into their full force. Here we hear the absolute peak in progressive-like drumming filled with the time changes and smart structural dynamics in the solos and instrumental in general coupled with Heiman's unmatched and unbeatably performed harmonies, choruses and outer-galactic power screams. Stu Block of Iced Earth stated that he'd give any amount of money for Heiman's lessons.

To conclude, only once in a lifetime you can witness to the likes, as Iron Maiden, one and only Ronnie James Dio, GN'R(in terms of a sudden revolution), Riot etc. and many other bands, musicians, classical and other genius composers but in the whole galaxy and quantum universe there is no other band that has produced a more powerful, complete and revolutionary resemblance and reflection of the highest and truest ideals of the heavy metal lifestyle concept in thinking of thy individual. With the product of their talent and cohesive creativity Lost Horizon has united freedom and the individual into single form of existence by never being cheesy, immature, unclear but abstract, accessibly complex and powerful as you would expect from the TRUE metal band that'd crush conventional standards in making their own, expanded to all the lost horizons of unheard creativity.