Outstanding review on Ravenheart Music !
(Scarlet Records) Reviewed 14th September 2012
The mighty French formation, founded in 2007 by guitarist Vynce Leff, return with the eagerly anticipated follow up to their outstanding 2009 début, ‘From the Brink of Infinity’. Their music sits in it’s own unique place, they are the prog rock and metal loving cousins of a modern but heavier Nightwish and a grow less Epica. Brand new singer Elvyne Lorient does sound at times rather like Anette Olzon, her sweet voice juxtaposed against the tumultuous typhoon raging behind her, she does an incredible job of not getting swept away in the cyclone, standing loud and proud, personified by her peerless performance on ‘Cassandra’s Mirror’, and she enjoys the support of their very own Dark Whispers Choir, who also appear with the band at their shows. Once again Vynce’s production pulls off the seemingly impossible task of keeping the 16,000 things that are going on simultaneously as clear as a bell, as well as making it sound like a homogeneous whole, quite how he does it without it turning into soup defies all logic. They are a fantastic and hugely entertaining band live, but it’s interested how they strip away all the complexity, and concentrate on rocking the place and having a good time. This is a set of eleven thundering throbbing thumping songs with immense refrains, 70 minutes of music rammed into the grooves, including the totally staggering, jaw dropping ‘On The Road to Babylon’, which sounds at times something like Yes gone symphonic heavy metal, afterwards they allow a few moments of quiet for us to recover before the dramatic ballad ‘Paper Princess’ with it’s extraordinary Rachmaninov esque piano by Marc. Other highlights include the Celtic flavoured ‘Lonely Roads’, the swaggering 'The Foreseer' and the closing humungous epic ‘Cathedral of the Damned’. Every song has so much going on you can listen to this until the end of time and still find something new, like Xavier's terrific bass solo in ‘Venom and Frustration’ which Jaco Pastorius would be proud of, and the orchestral arrangement's by Vynce are simply wondrous. Whyzdom have produced a mind boggling, colossal, awe inspiring album that will have every symphonic metal fan salivating, especially those of a prog persuasion. Their website can be found here, a mind blowing 9.5/10 (Phil).
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