Visions of Atlantis - Delta
Napalm Records
Power Metal
10 songs (43:44)
Release year: 2011
Visions of Atlantis, Napalm Records
Reviewed by Jaime
Sometimes there's an advantage to listening to black metal bands. You might be able to hint at their lyrics being silly and cheesy or just plain bad but half the time you're not going to be able to make them out. With power metal they don't have that veil to hide behind, so they really need to go all out with the silliness and cheese (like say... Edguy or Rhapsody of Fire respectively), or they'll just end up with some pretty bland verbiage that's voiced by a generic, floaty pseudo-soprano and some dude who's addicted to 80's cop shows from the US. And with that :Visions of Atlantis.

There will be a word that'll pop up rather a lot so I'll forewarn you about it just now. That word is generic. It's already appeared once already. Go on, look up a bit and you'll find it. It's not far. But back to the task at hand. What we have here is a very generic stab at power metal, with a mix of generic floaty womanvocals, generic American wannabe manvocals, the occasional classical based guitar lead, generic rehashed riffs with generic muddy guitar tones, some stupidly fake sounding drums and something I've commented on before: utterly ballless keyboard sounds. Please, if you're gonna try and be epic stop using patches that sound like something Roland threw out in the 90's. The production is fairly flat as well. Nothing really stands out, that guitar tone adds a really bad fuzz that masks and overpowers a few things where a cleaner production job would have suited this type of music far better. Not that there's much going on guitar wise that's worth commenting about. The drums are... crikey. Keyboards I've complained about already, though the actual parts aren't bad, just need more juice. The vocals are an interesting one though. While they're not mould breaking in any way the production serves to make them a bit worse, with them sounding buried in the mix (thanks in part to that guitar tone) and being layered into a cluttered, indecipherable mess. This is pretty noticeable on Reflection, the generic ballad, as just having a single vocal line with little layers for some of the lifts would have worked far better as opposed to having the entire song riddled with them and sitting at about the same level as the main vocal, resulting in the mess I was on about.

Oh, have I not talked about the songs up until now? For the most part they mesh into one another. Where Daylight Fails looked to change tacks from the first three songs with its little piano intro, and, excluding the choruses, is a little bit more interesting than the bog standard fare that most European power metal bands believe is passable. They almost got onto a roll with the following track Conquest of Others which goes a bit heavier until the choruses hit (again). A shame really, as this is probably the most memorable song on the album. The male vocals are ever so slightly less grating thanks to the track's more aggressive edge too. The only other stand out track is Reflection, the ballad, and the rest are basically interchangeable.

There's no real emotion, drive, bombast, cheese, power (in power metal!), anything that makes this band stand out from the seething masses that do exactly the same thing. You can safely miss thing knowing that you'll probably end up hearing a hundred other bands who sound like they've either covered or have been covered by this lot.
Killing Songs :
Conquest of Others I suppose...
Jaime quoted 55 / 100
Other albums by Visions of Atlantis that we have reviewed:
Visions of Atlantis - Ethera reviewed by Andy and quoted 59 / 100
Visions of Atlantis - Maria Magdalena reviewed by Jaime and quoted no quote
Visions of Atlantis - Cast Away reviewed by Ben and quoted 45 / 100
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There are 21 replies to this review. Last one on Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:54 am
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