I have accumulated many personal reviews while listening to albums. My reviewing style is non-conventional and was only intended for myself. Sometimes I will only use one sentence to describe an album if I feel that is all that's required. Other times I will review an album while I'm still listening to it, leading to a song-by-song review of the album (bringing the size of the review to nearly dissertation-level). There are times when I will even come back to a review to add information that I didn't know when originally writing the review. The point is that I won't edit my reviews to make them more readable or conventional. My reviews are always a direct result of what I was feeling when I wrote them and I want to let that feeling come through.



Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Elysian Fields - 12abLAZe [2001]

Interesting, definitely not what I thought it would be like. The production is a bit better than We… The Enlightened. I wasn't expecting such a melodic riff to open up the CD. Then it goes into a cool keyboard part with grinding that's much more Black Metal. Eventually drops out into piano and really evil keys. The keys feel like they're missing a bit of power because of the way they're recorded, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. HOLY SHIT! THEY'RE USING STEEL DRUMS??!! The production lacks a bit of punch, but makes up for it by having all the instruments be crystal clear. Second track starts off with beautiful keys. Album seems like it's going to be nicely varied. Really cool key parts in track 3… it has a strange feel to it, like a video game but a bit more epic. Track 5 is blazingly fast. Overall, this CD is way creative in it's songwriting. It's got a very fantastic quality to it that makes it feel like it's from another planet all together. The keys are amazingly well-done throughout the entire album. I don't think that there was one key part that fell flat for me. The guitar riffs are ok overall, but the starting riff of the cd really made me worried until the keys kicked in that they had sold out and were just following the Melodic Metal trend that everyone and their dogs are doing. Even though the guitars are pretty stock melodic riffs throughout the album, there are times of real genius where the riffs synthesize perfectly with what the keys are doing and create a very fantasyesque feel to the song. The album has flow, but it isn't perfectly connected like Dream Theater's Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and doesn't leave me at the end with tears in my eyes. However, it's still a damn compelling album written very very well.

Rating: 8.5

http://www.zenial.nl/html/elysianf.htm

All ratings are out of 10. Rating may not be a whole number.

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