Band:	Maniac Saint
Album:	One
Style:	Power metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	2007
A review by:	Baz Anderson

01. Angel
02. Promised Land
03. Anybody Seen My Baby? [The Rolling Stones cover]
04. I Believe
05. Resolution
06. The Parasite
07. Sanguine
08. Deny
09. Senseless
10. Higher Than The Sky [Rage cover]
11. Whispers At The Break Of Dawn

Austrian metallers Maniac Saint are here to make an impression with their first album "One" released through Terrasound Records. Upon first impressions holding the colourful digipack the cover and colours give an impression of some kind of an industrial metal album, however Maniac Saint are indeed a more traditional metal outfit - but there are some electronical snippets sprinkled in there as well.

For an album lasting nearly fifty minutes, "One" has no real highlights; it has no real high selling point. Guitars are slightly heavy, drumming is average and the singing is nothing to boast about either. The album is produced nicely, we can actually hear the content of this album properly and also metal is such a hard field to get noticed in these days it probably did seem a good idea at the time to add some few electronical elements to add a hint of originality but these seldom appear and when they do, are nothing to take note of.

The attention system in humans is designed to attend to only interesting things; things that move or constantly change, generally just things that are of use to the self as we do not have the capabilities to process every detail in the sensory world around us. Listening to "One" it would appear that my own attention system finds mindlessly browsing the internet among other things more worthy of attention, as nothing grabs the listener and drags them in. It all seems a little monotonous, there is never any real pace in the album, and for the type of a heavy metal band "One" sounds like they are aspiring to be, they are musically lacking grit and determination. The album just has no life, no spirit of rock.

Be sure to know it gives me no pleasure when the majority of points raised about an album are those of a negative nature, "One" was given a fair listening but it just fails to stand up and be noticed. Unfortunately it may be back to the drawing board for Maniac Saint as "One" will not have made a giant wave in the world of metal, more like a mere ripple of a raindrop plopping back into a vast ocean - nothing significant at all.