Band:	Midwinter
Album:	The Glassy Waters
Style:	Gothic metal
Website:	http://www.midwinterworld.com
Release date:	April 21, 2007
A review by:	Jeff

01. Black Hole Attraction
02. Seed Of Pain
03. The Cripple
04. Illusion
05. One Day You'll Set In The Land Where You Belong
06. One In A Hole
07. The Silence Of Your Eyes
08. Sweet Child O'Mine
09. My Fury
10. Atmospherics

Let's be honest, the first album of Midwinter was a pure clone of Nightwish. It wasn't bad but suffered of the comparison with the confirmed bands of this trendy musical style. But it's different nowadays, the trend is dying and a lot of bands try to change a bit their sound to survive. Midwinter decided to change a bit too and it's not a bad thing because musically speaking it's really better and a lot more personal and original than on the previous album. That's a good thing?

"The Glassy Waters" is darker than the previous album, "Fountain of Youth" and if you already know this release, you'll clearly hear that the band add a lot of personality to their music since 2003. Without being perfect, "The Glassy Waters" is a lot more interesting (it doesn't sound like a copy anymore) than "Fountain Of Youth" especially in reason of the dark elements that we can find on the songs now like the little progressive touches that you can encounter sometime. It's still Melodic Power Metal but not so easy and commercial than the one on the previous album. I can tell you that Midwinter is growing, that's a fact, the band is more mature now and the musicians wrote a bunch of good pleasant songs.

However I have a big problem with this release? the singer. The performance of Mylène Genoux is more than average and really the performance of previous singer was better. A lot of girls want to sing like Tarja Turunen but they don't all have her voice and here, the voice of Mylène seems to be false and even a bit out of tune sometime especially when she tries to do high pitched vocals. It's problematic because this is the first thing that you'll hear when you'll listen to the album and it doesn't help the music. However, she is young and her voice is not terrible so it should be better with time but obviously she will have to work to improve her vocals.

With a really nice production signed one more time by Pierre-Emmanuel Pellison (ex Heavenly) with a lot of good new ideas and finally a music which is a lot more personal, Midwinter release a good new album. However, all is not perfect yet and the band will have to fix some problems if they really want to become a bit more famous. We don't have perfection here but good hopes? let's say that if should work if the band follows this road and still work to improve.