01. Stone Itself
02. Needle Your Way
03. Agnostic Apology
04. Vanquished
05. The Human Abstract
06. Cynics Of Life
07. The Fall
08. Second Dance
09. NU
10. Within Me

When a band, particularly one with sparse online presence, goes many years after releasing a debut album without further activity, one tends to suspect that said group disbanded without fanfare. However, not long after unexpectedly encountering Eden Circus’s vocalist on a new album from an unfamiliar group, the same voice is now heard again within a more familiar context.

It's not easy to piece together the whole story behind the decade-plus gap between Eden Circus’s 2014 debut album Marula, which received a warm reception on this site upon release, and the belated sophomore album Irrlicht. One announcement that coincided with the release of their first single in a decade lists many of the typical factors (line-up changes, Covid, and general life happenings), but the long drought between releases for both this band and vocalist Siegmar Holzfuß’s other group Benthic until this year leaves room to wonder over additional factors disrupting the bands’ activity. With all that said, Eden Circus are back.

They’re not picking up entirely where they left off, however; Marula stylistically lurked within a loose overlap of alternative, progressive and post-metal, but the latter style seems to have been dropped along the way, as the songs on Irrlicht are broadly conventionally structured songs mostly clocking in around the 5-minute mark. The alt/prog mish-mash on display has the band hitting somewhat similar notes to Karnivool, albeit with a bit more of a subdued vibe overall.

First impressions after such a hiatus are important, and the album gets off to a reasonably solid start with “Stone Itself”, which gradually builds from muted beginnings through layering and complexify rhythms in its opening minute (one of the few remaining hints of post-metal) before shifting into atmospheric verses and big, heavy choruses. The song, like much of the album, combines the accessibility and tonality of alt-metal with some of the convoluted rhythmicity of prog-metal, showing off more of the latter during its escalating bridge.

It's a promising opening, but the album soon loses some momentum with “Needle Your Way”. The song’s middle, which shows off the band’s proggier side to good effect, is generally enjoyable, but it is really brought down by the frankly insufferable post-grunge (for lack of a better label) verses that bookend it. I’ve mentioned the vocalist Holzfuß a couple of times now, and back on Marula I generally enjoyed his voice, in spite of its strained huskiness, but there’s a few times I really don’t jive with it on Irrlicht, and these verses are the worst offender, breathing no charisma into what sound like turn-of-the-millennium discarded alt rock vocal melodies that should never have been resurrected. The song is the longest on the album, but trimming those bookending sections could make both a more concise and more enjoyable track out of it.

My struggles with the vocals carry on into the next couple of songs; “Agnostic Apology” has some grating vocal hooks (although I enjoy the Leprous-esque instrumentation that appears in parts), and while there’s a nice heft to the opening riff of “The Human Abstract”, the delivery of the chorus doesn’t quite work for me. However, while the first half of the album did cause some disappointment in me for such a long-awaited release, there are positives to be heard (the rhythms and textures of “Vanquished” are pleasant, as is a tasty post-chorus tremolo guitar solo), and Irrlicht leans far more towards those positives in its second half.

“Cynics Of Life” offers a slight shake-up in tone by opening with a (relatively) fast, driving riff, and the contrast of that heaviness with the complex textures of the cleaner, daintier sequences are well received. Right after, “The Fall” maintains a consistent and alluring broody vibe throughout, never going too quiet or too loud as it persists with a subtly dark and textured alt-metal groove, and the similarly understated “NU” delivers a pleasantly wistful tone through its A Perfect Circle-inspired melodies and layers (Holzfuß’s voice actually sounds somewhat like a husky Maynard Keenan on this song as well).

Tracks that make good use of wider tonal range include “Second Dance”, which has a melancholic darkness to its heavy choruses contrasted with soft verses imbued with longing, and which offers perhaps the standout passage of the record with the build of its bridge and subsequent seque into a solo. Coming in last, “Within Me” feels somewhat bright to begin with as slick drum rhythms drive it along, but there’s a gloomy yet grandiose intensity to its chorus; this song also features one of the very few instances of harsher vocals appearing on Irrlicht, an element that was similarly infrequently utilized on Marula.

The more things change, the more they stay the same; Marula was a solid if flawed album, and the same can be said about Irrlicht. I would say, however, that both the peaks and the troughs of this release are clearly lower than they were on the debut (certainly, there’s nothing here that rivals the quality of the album’s closing song “Playing You”). Still, considering the apparent difficulties in bringing this record to fruition, there’s enough to enjoy about Irrlicht to make those efforts worthwhile.