|
Review:
|
After curing my Insomnia with Mastermind’s latest release,
I now find myself in the arms of Morpheus. This is the dream
debut opus from the German gothic prog metal outfit with
two schönen damen, Mira Kohli on vocals and Natalie Droge
on bass (they should feature them in the artwork, make a
nice change from the normal hairy musos). It is professionally
produced by Christian ‘Moschus’ Moos, notable for his work
with bands such as Imperia and Satyrian. After a brief spooky
intro we get started with ‘Reality’ which segues seamlessly
into ‘Revelation’, imagine Dream Theatre technical staccato
riffage meets haunting Gathering gothicness and Porcupine
Tree atmospherics. ‘Contacting the Angelic’, great title,
starts out creepy and ethereal on a foundation of Natalie’s
bass arpeggios with Mira’s eastern flavoured vocals, she
has a lovely vibrato to her voice, before it climbs into
a superb guitar solo by Sasha Gutkowski. It’s then straight
into the three part instrumental ‘Pandemonium’ without a
pause for a doze. The album concludes with the phantasmagorical
‘Return of Reality’’, it’s great to hear some lovely old
Mellotron and Hammond, it then grows wings and takes flight.
The musicianship throughout is exemplary, I should also
mentioned Peter Rosinski’s skilled drumming. People who
like their prog technical but melodic, adventurous but accessible,
powerful but atmospheric, and who are into bands such a
Dream Theatre, Porcupine Tree and Ayreon, will want to curl
up with this in bed, so if you’re a somnambulist, perambulate
to CD Baby, and sleep easy at night. Time to climb the wooden
hills to the Land of Nod, zzzzzzzzzz.
9 out of 10. Phil.
|
