Band:	Concerto Moon
Album:	Rain Forest
Style:	Power metal
Release date:	July 23, 1999
A review by:	Pierre Tombale

01. Prologue
02. Time To Die
03. Lonely Last Journey
04. Fight To The Death
05. Half Way To The Sun
06. Rain Forest
07. Unstill Night
08. Live On The Memory
09. Victim Of Desire
10. Picture Of An Old Man
11. Break It Down
12. Time To Die [extended version] [bonus]
13. King Of The Judas [bonus]
14. Waltz For Masquerade [bonus]

Big in Japan, that's what you can say about Concerto Moon, they have returned with their 3rd album Rain Forest to expand their power and glory reign in their native Japan. Once more they show that they're fanatics about technical brilliance and great melodic metal:

Opened with the atmospheric 'Prologue' were floating down the stream of melody into the first and best song on the album 'Time To Die'. But in fact there are no major differences between the songs in a whole, anyway 'Time To Die' and 'Time To Die extended version' are (as they are the same, the extended only begins with a huge guitar solo) the outstanding songs.
'Lonely Last Journey' is a desperate mid-tempo ballad, another fine piece especially the vocals of the metal smith's from the land of the rising sun, that still are able to improve?
To go not too much into details, let's continue with the title track 'Rain Forest', expect the unexpected: it's an amazing intrumental (and here we are at the point at which intrumentals should take a huge part of Concerto Moon's songs for the following years), as usual great guitar work by Norifumi Shima embedded in the atmospheric surroundings of the keys. Close your eyes and listen to the crickets chirping and the birds singing when night falls over the rain forest (without using sound effects, just the pure music not counting acoustic simulators or reverb) amazing images can be created in your head for almost seven minutes without getting boring. Of course this image is enhanced by the yet best cover art-work until the release of the following album (regarding CM's disco solely). On 'Unstill Night' I expect that Rainbow influences can be clearly heard, a rough song, but typical backing of hard rocking guitars with organ, like Rainbow did in the 70's, if I'm not mistaken also the vocals are the rawest on the whole record? anyway, a good song. 'Live On The Memory' kind of dominates the following songs that can be put all in the same category: 'Picture Of An Old Man' is a ballad completely without drums and with very sad melodies and vocals and 'Waltz For Masquerade' is just another good intrumental.

Concluding that this is Takao Ozaki's best and final appearance as vocalist for Concerto Moon, the whole band has shown some improvement, once again and as expected. The 14- track-version including three bonus tracks with a total playing time of 75 mintes and 15 seconds is all worth the money, as mentioned the best output of CM with singer Takao Ozaki.
Virtuous, exciting? go get it!

Reviewed by Iron Markus