Metal Reviews
Metal Reviews
ODES OF ECSTACY |
|
The tracks are : The next track is 'The Total Absence Of Light (Act I)', this track starts off orchestrally, but it's not long before the heavy guitars enter. Although the music is quite heaavy in parts, there is still quite a melodic quality retained. The vocals are a mixture of death metal and operatic and suprisingly it works very well. The third track 'Faithless (Act II)', carries on in the operatic theme. Once again the vocaals are a mixture of death metal and operatic. The music is once agin fairly heavy in parts with a melodic quality and featuring some fine guitar and keybaord work. The next track 'War Symphonies (Act III)', this track is much more guitar based and has a great drivin' rhythn to it. There's some excellent guitar work and this time the vocals are more distorted. Later on into the track there's some nice keyboards but these are mainly in the background. The track closes with some excellent acoustic guitar which comes over with a classical influence. 'Garden Of Temptation (Act IV)', starts with some nice guitar and operatic vocals, the tune is quite catchy and there'ss also some nice guitar and keyboards. Later the death metal vocaals come in and then there's a change in direction, going more into a Gaelic theme vocally and musically. Later there's another change with some nice guitar and keyboards, then it's back the death metal and operatic vocals, with some Gothic style keyboards. The sixth and final track is 'Vampire Hunters', contains some sampled voices from the film "Dracula". This is quie a haunting piece of music which at times gets very intense. This track to me has the same kind of rhythm and build up as in the track 'Mars' by Gustav Holst. 'Odes Of Ecstacy' is a bit like listening to a classical album, except that on this particular album there's a mixture of operatic and death metal vocals, and obviously the music is a lot heavier. I suppose you could class it as a Gothic Opera. Personnaly i like it and it's one of those albums that grows on you the more you listen to it.
Released by The End Records.
556 S. Fair Oaks Avenue #101-111. Pasadena. CA 91105 USA. |
|
Deceitful Melody Odes of Ecstasy |
|
"Deceitful Melody," a purposeful play on words that transcends mere literary conception in terms of its arranged multiplicity and diversity of range, confined never to expectation yet ever growing broader and stronger from that unholiest of impious musical boundaries. The Greek-based Odes of Ecstasy was indeed a find eight years earlier and an impressive mainstay on The End's roster. Fleeting Black Metal arrangements combined with Gothic qualities and symphonic arrangements-its genre-bending to be sure, not in a revolutionary sense but expounding on that which had been previously explored and having found their own sanctity within music that can be both atrocious and alluring. From the pages of medieval mythology, "Deceitful Melody" changes, reinvents itself with the capacity to go from dark to light, menacing to mesmerizing and with the inspiring vocal variety of dual male-led brutality and female-driven charm. Oftentimes subdued, nearly nocturnal in nature but not wholly so-substantive folklore written into fantastic, desperate journeys as the themed "Deceitful Melody," "One With The Darkness," with its heightened sense of drama and traditionally-inspired intensity, this is perhaps Odes of Ecstasy's crowning moment on this very piece. The spirited grandeur of "The Floating City of Sun," tranquil from the onset, smoothly presented, like a flowing river that cuts through all in its path, this is where Progressive instinct meets traditionally dark surroundings and undermines all that was previous to it… For a subtle blend of further recorded history, their poetic tastes arrive also in the form of Poe's "The Conqueror Worm," in a dynamic, dramatic, and widely homophonic manner. "Abstract Thoughts" lyrically conjures up the image of the whole; "Deceitful Melody," among the boldest new arrivals in the expansive class of operatic Black Metal, Goth and Doom-consider it a shadow of the past and a revealing future of majestic proportions. Released by The End Records.
556 S. Fair Oaks Avenue #101-111. Pasadena. CA 91105 USA. Review by Vinnie Apicella [va85@columbia.edu] |