Band:	Moonlight Agony
Album:	Silent Waters
Style:	Power metal
Release date:	2007
A review by:	Jeff

01. Leaving Solitude
02. You Betrayed Me
03. Soulless
04. Through The Desert Storm
05. The Dark Era
06. I'm Alive
07. Room 101
08. Different Stories
09. Bloodred Sails
10. Solemn Waters
11. Secret [Japanese bonus]

They came from Sweden and play a Dark Progressive Power Metal. They're a young combo and "Silent Waters" is their second album. Who are they? Any ideas? Well, I'm talking about Moonlight Agony one of the last signatures of the really good German label Dockyard 1. A bit like Evergrey, the band mixes Dark Progressive music with Power Metal with the big difference that the music of the Moonlight Agony is clearly more oriented toward the Power Metal direction than Progressive Metal.

Moonlight Agony comes from Sweden and plays a mix of Progressive Metal with Power and we have a lot of similarities with the music of Evergrey that's right. The music is technical the riffs are heavy and complex but the songs are dark with Progressive (strong keyboards lines etc) structures and the general atmosphere of the album is not so funny. But strangely, the choruses are hyper catchy and really "Power" in the spirit and that's weird because only some songs suffer of this problem. I have the feeling that the process of writing of this album wasn't so coherent it's a bit like if we have two albums, two different bands on one CD.

As you can see, the main problem of the album is that a lot of the songs sound too much Power. Sometime you'll even have the feeling that you're listening to Dragonforce or Rhapsody?. Well, I'm a bit exaggerating here but damn sometime the riffs are clearly too "happy" and it's really sad because some other ones are really dark and really progressive? Moonlight Agony didn't find the way to mix perfectly those two different musics and it's weird, not really homogeneous. Some of you will find it a bit disturbing in my opinion.

My friends, we're in front of a promising band here. All is not perfect on the release but some songs like "Leaving Solitude" are really good and I hope that the band will continue to write similar songs to this one for their future albums. If they manage to do it, then Moonlight Agony will reach a really different point of notoriety you can trust me. If you like Dark Progressive Power, have a look on this release, of course remember too that Moonlight Agony is a young band and that all is not perfect yet but I'm sure that in the end, like me, you'll believe in the future of the band and keep an eye on them.