#5 Lonestar: Anubis Gate – Horizons
Okay, time to kick off this thing with what I regret having to call my least favourite album of the round. At its best moments, this album is a great improvement on most of the sounds Circus Maximus are going for, and overall some very catchy modern progressive metal. “Revolution Come Undone” is a great example of this, and with that said it is my favourite song on the album. They do that cool thing where they crank up the tempo in the pre-chorus and maintain that momentum in the chorus, really cool dynamics. At its worst moments the album comes across to me like an inferior mix of Circus Maximus, Teramaze and at some places Headspace/Threshold, at least the vocals channel some Damian Wilson (especially on “Erasure”). They do wear their influences on their sleeves and it is something I don’t mind, as long as the combination of the sum of parts is appealing.
What did strike me as songs that stuck out like a sore thumb were the ones where the vocal melodies came out a bit awkward and the feel of the vocals contradicted those of the riffs. One moment that captures this very well was the first verse of “Breach of Faith”, which does have some catchy moments but just didn’t really hook me the way Revolution Come Undone did. That song relied on its quiet piano interludes for me, and they were actually some of the strongest moments of the song and the entire album, reminding me heavily of the Fullmetal Alchemist soundtracks (very beautiful and haunting at the same time). I must also confess that the callback to “Never Like This (A Dream)” on “A Dream Within a Dream” was very cool, and made me realize how good that hook was. Even if that song did not quite live up to the amount of time it took up on the album, there were some really good moments that defined a lot of what this album is about.
Not much more to say really, it is a solid progressive metal effort and no doubt these guys are technicians but at the same time put more emphasis on melody and catchiness than complexity. But at the same time it does sound like a recycled piece of music from (for the most part superior) stuff I have heard before elsewhere. I feel like the infectiousness is both their biggest strength and at certain points the biggest weakness for me.
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12. Revolution Come Undone
13. A Dream Within a Dream
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15. Destined to Remember
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22. Hear My Call
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25. Never Like This (A Dream)
26. Horizons
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29. Breach of Faith
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32. Erasure
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36. Mindlessness
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39. Airways
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That was actually a pretty good album looking back at it, I'll gladly return to it in the future. The others just happened to be better.
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