Forgot to mention this about VUUR, but at times they sound a bit like Devin Townsend Project, and I don't mean Anneke, but in the guitars. Certain parts remind me of the first Ziltoid album.
Bumping this to pay homage to this album. Took me quite a while but I finally "got" this record and I like it a lot, and I eventually purchased it.
I won't say all the songs are great, in that regard The Gentle Storm was vastly superior, but once you get the mood of the album and the idea behind it, it all kinda flows together.
I love how the lyrics manage to put the title of the album in every song, and the idea of making personifications of cities to tell about them in the lyrics is great. From interviews I gathered that the song about Berlin is after World War II, about a town trying to rise from its ashes, while Time, which is about Rotterdam, is about the uncertainty before the war - at face value I could have said from the lyrics that it was about a person suffering from anxiety and depression, but it's the city itself the protagonist, not someone living in the city, and so the lyrics are a metaphor for the big dread that would foretell the incoming disaster of the war.
Favorite songs: My Champion (great chorus), The Martyr and the Saint (Love the bridge "Reunite heaven and earth"), Freedom, Sail Away (catchiest chorus of the bunch) and Your Glorious Light will Shine.
I'm even considering about seeing this live, though the setlists don't convince me too much, I would have loved more Gentle Storm songs...