Meduza's debut album presents classical riff based Heavy Metal with many Power Metal elements. The guitar is very much in focus and takes up a lot of space, both rhythm and leads, lots of shredding and cool licks. Lets take a closer look behind the curtain.
One of the better songs is
Shed No Tears, gaining a lot by its powerful and melodic chorus and participating bass approach.
I Will Rise follows a quite simple path without much variation both musically and structure wise, again a strong and well-performed refrain saves some of the day.
Sleep mixes soft acoustic rhythms with slow electric chorus passages, a pretty decent creation managing to create a cool relaxing atmosphere.
Touch The Sky impresses with a cool technical mid-section of great drum variations and excitingly fast guitar soloing, Apollo's voice is very forceful but lacks a bit of harmony from time to time, a general remark that goes for the album as a whole.
There are very few songs that succeeds in holding my interest feed, standard rhythm structures and dull choruses are unfortunately a wide spread phenomenon on this album.
Twilight Of My Mind relies on a monotone rhythm that is sedative in the negative meaning of the word, the chorus being just as tiresome.
The main rhythm and riff featured in
Burn In Hell is simply one of the most unexciting I have come across, a terrible song that just keeps on grooving into what almost seems as nothingness.
Holy Ground offers powerful riffing, supporting keys, a progressive piano passage and some superfluous guitar leads. I like most of Stefan Berg's guitar work on this release but there is a tendency for overdoing it sometimes, this is still a good song though.
Musical and vocally the execution is firm and professional, not being mind-blowing by any means.
I find the lyrical content quite interesting and well written, standing your ground, lost love and spiritual topics are main areas of interest, again it doesn't exactly leave you stunned or highly enlightened.
The production is quite good and energetic, although the double bass drums have a weird minor hollow sound that I'm not too found of.
Now And Forever has some good melodic songs, quite a lot of standard cuts and a few that to a high extent lack durable and dynamic ideas. An overall below average release that isn't bad.
Written by
Tommy Sunday, January 16, 2005
Show all reviews by TommyRatingsTommy: 4.5/10Members: No members have rated this album yet.
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