Band:	Legenda Aurea
Album:	Sedna
Style:	Symphonic power metal
Release date:	2007
Guest review by:	ErnilEnNaur

01. Intro
02. Vengeance
03. War Victim
04. Sedna
05. It's Over
06. Years Of Coldness
07. Total Eclipse
08. Instrumental
09. As The Leaves Fly
10. Farewell

There is a bad way and a good way in which one band can resemble another (in this case that other band is Nightwish). The bad way is listening to an album and thinking: "Pfft...they might as well be a Nightwish tribute band!" The good way is listening to an album and thinking: "Wow! They could be a Nightwish from an alternate universe!" Legenda Aurea's debut album Sedna (named after the Inuit sea goddess) belongs in the second category. Their music immediately reminds me of (early) Nightwish, but no one song from Sedna reminds me of any particular Nightwish song. This is called drawing inspiration from another band, as opposed to ripping them off and out of all the obscure bands that remind me of Finland's biggest metal act, Legenda Aurea are undoubtedly the best.

There is something special about bands where the creative force is the keyboard player because they have a different approach to songwriting than guitarists. This is also true of Legenda Aurea's keyboardist and primary songwriter Renato Trinkler. He certainly follows in the footsteps of Tuomas Holopainen in that he is both a great melody-maker and a visual composer, whose music inspires scenes to form in the listener's mind. This makes Sedna not just a consistently good album with one great track following another, but also a great album for an escapist like myself. These songs are so well-written and rich with ideas that you will end up discovering a new favorite every time you listen to the album. In the end, I settled for the closing track "Farewell" as the highlight of Sedna. This absolute gem of a song demonstrates best how Legenda Aurea make symphonic arrangements an essential part of their music and use them to complement the main melodies, they don't just leave them floating around on the background. Only two songs on the album are easily forgettable: the intro, which features a somewhat silly spoken monologue and one instrumental track, but even those songs aren't bad, they just aren't anything special.

The lyrics are dark, as is the case with many debut albums in this genre, but they're also beautiful and can be very poetic. For example: "Predicting the cold/ Each tree desolates his dress/ Abandoned in eternal winter/ Our endeavors have lost all sense". I've always liked bands that tell stories through lyrics and Legenda Aurea do this very well. These dark, but wonderful lyrics and the fantastic melodies they accompany are performed with elegance and sincerity by vocalist Claudia Hofer. Unfortunately her voice is a little bit too quiet and lacks power, her low notes are often overpowered by the instruments. This isn't so much Claudia's fault as it is a problem with the production, which is far from great and Sedna's only true weakness.

If Sedna should ever receive a re-release where the quality of the production equals the quality of the songwriting, then my rating will be closer to a 9 than a 7. Fans of female fronted symphonic metal: this one is highly recommended.