Vintersea - Illuminated

Terrific band, but only on this album. Ignore the debut, which is mostly sub-par, with a rather bad production and even the chick sound off-tune in some songs. This is where they matured and made their quantum leap. Whoever wants to hear what Oceans of Slumber would have been have they not went for a melodic sound, check this out. An explosion of extreme, quasi-innovative metal, with great female harsh and clean vocals. Like all more complex albums, this one needs a few spins to properly asses. For example, Befallen was the track I considered the least impressive at first listen. But after a few more spins, it became my favorite track. A very promising band. Too bad there are so many useless crap ones which makes it harder to find the really brilliant ones. Lucky they had a great and smexy vocalist (who is Asian at origin also) which gives them more exposure, otherwise I might have not even heard of them.

A fantastic overlooked gem. This album has everything I love about metal with fantastic production. More innovation in the songwriting department would help make it even better, but as it stands the songs are memorable and powerful.

8.8/10 for me - 'Illuminated' and 'Befallen' are the standout songs. 'Crack Of Light' is also great. 'Old Ones' is the weakest song.

Looking forward to their next album which I believe they are working on right now.

Written by Hyamendacil1450 on 05.01.2021 at 13:30

properly asses

I sincerely apologise for my immaturity.

From zero to hero and then again to zero. This album epitomizes modern day perfection. Not one single bad song. It ranges from brilliance (Befallen, Spawn Awakening) to very good (Fiery Tongue). I can hardly think of other quantum leap comparisons in terms of metal bands. Maybe Sodom, going from their debut album to Persecution Mania, or Razor going from from their debut to Evil Invaders.

Refreshingly non-cliched, fairly non-stereotypical, non-cheesy prog metal. This means actual prog metal - as opposed to the usual washed up Eurovision Song Contest-cloned poptimistic MTV-chart shite disguised as metal while stupidly pretending to be "progressive" as well. Everybody's doing it though these days, i.e. pretending to be progressive: shitty cheesy metal bands as well as left-wing idiots.

What do I mean by "from zero to hero and then again to zero" is that this band started off rather weak, the debut is awfully produced, the vocals are nowhere near as good as on this album and the songwriting was also uneven (albeit its potential could be diminished by the awful production, hard to tell). No noteworthy songs either. Their third album is pretty much the same as the debut (thus back to zero) but it has one good song (Unveiling Light).