Beholder - The Legend Begins
DragonHeart / SPV
True Metal
10 songs (47'30)
Release year: 2001
Beholder, DragonHeart
Reviewed by Chris

Now that's the perfect example of how vocal is important in an album and how bad vocals can kill one. There I am, listening to a demonstration of songwriting, with great musicianship (except vocals), with guitars riffs and solos to drive me crazy, but in the end, the album is worth finishing to my trash. This band deserves to get a chance, because their metal is excellent, but the 2 poor excuses for singers are so bad that they make the CD worthless... can you believe this ? Believe me if you try you would.

So the singers (or wanna be singers) are a male and a female duet. Not only it's a gutsy move to bet on a male-female duet, but it's a difficult choice, you want both voices to go along nicely and you might need to adapt your singing style to merge with the other part. But to do this you require something that the band lacks : good singers !!! Let's face it, the most difficult thing to find in a band is a decent singer, so why try from day one to have two ? Well, this particular error in judgment will cost the band a price I hope they're ready to afford. Now I can accept the female vocals, the girl have a nice voice and might only need some work to improve her singing skills a bit, but the male vocals are a joke (did the guy improvise himself as a singer 5 minutes before they entered the studio or what ?) !!! Not only the guy can't sing correctly (I sing better, and believe me I sing bad :) !), but he takes a stupid kind of tone with his voice which makes him really ridiculous.

If we put the vocals aside for a second (but can we ??), we discover another world, a world where guitars, bass and arrangements unite to deliver an impressive music piece. The guitars are simply amazing, each time I listen to this album I get completely nuts by the skills of the guitar players and the melodies that comes out of them... and each time the vocals starts I bang my head against the nearest wall to make the pain go away... God, what a waste ! The drums also needs some work as they sound a bit too artificial, but that's maybe just the overall production that need some tweaking.

Musically superb, the vocals killed this bird before it could start flying... a bit of advice, fire the male singer, let the girl improve or simply get one (and only) talented singer and let this band be what it could be. Too bad.

Killing Songs :
They could all be killing if it wasn't for the awful vocals.
Chris quoted 53 / 100
Other albums by Beholder that we have reviewed:
Beholder - Wish For Destruction reviewed by Danny and quoted 78 / 100
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