Mabool - The Story of the Three Sons of Seven

It took 8 years for 'Orphaned Land' to return after their mighty 'El Norra Alila' with this shiny produced album, this time way more influenced by progressive rock and a bit distant from their metal roots.

The main problem of this album is the soft edge of the production. The keyboards increase different sounds and depth in 'Mabool', and that's a plus. However, the guitars have a really bad tone. It has a sound of a really cheap multi effect which producing some fragile distortion with extra middle frequencies. It causing the riffs to lose some necessary depth and often get lost in the mix, underneath the drums and vocals.

Another problem, which is a quite serious one, is the presence of fillers between the good songs. I personally prefer 30 minutes length albums which are topnotch all the way then 60 minutes length albums which make you to press the skip button too much. There are some really brilliant songs here, take for example the opener 'Birth Of The Three'. It starts with a fluid melodic, oriental riff which repeats itself quite much each time with a slightly different touch and varying instruments behind it. The vocals are just incredible, varying from simply spoken texts to clean vocals, oriental chants and harsh growls, all delivering the exact feeling of the lyrics. 'The Kiss Of Babylon' and 'Halo Dies' are the heavier tracks of this album, with some quite heavy riffs and catchy guitar leads, espically 'Halo Dies' which is a real progressive masterpiece.

However, there are too many weak tracks which just ruin the continuity of the good stuff.

'A Call To Awake' is plain bad. It has an Iron Maiden worship guitar theme which sound dumb and repeat itself too much. The vocals just don't reach any peak and so is the riffing which trying to be power metalish but just fails. The ending of the song is just awkward, some pretty bad technical keyboards masturbation that goes absolutely no where. 'A'salk' is a shitty interlude with some flat female trilling vocals in Yemen language. 'The Calm Before The Flood' is a boring overlong ambient track, like these you can hear in elevators. 'The Storm Still Rages Inside' is one long irritating guitar solo that leads to 'Rainbow' which is a nice and calm clean guitar theme, but a bit overlong.

Overall, the good songs of this album are really deep and worth listening, but there are just too many bad ideas here that could have been cut and make this album less frustrating. 'Mabool' has some really great material, it's just overlong and full with fillers. I do hope though, that their next album will be better, just like their old classics.