Astronomicon

Hungary’s Without Face were unknown to me when their sophomore album came into my hands. In fact, I had this album on the corner of my desk for about a month or so, but seeing that I'm so busy listening to the great new stuff I just received, (Lacuna Coil, Trail Of Tears, Rotting Christ, Mystic Circle) I didn’t have time to put an ear on that one. So what I decided to do was to take it to my car and listen to it every morning on the road to hell… sorry to work. I know this introduction is not really related to the music of Without Face, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with something to say as an introduction !

After I inserted the CD I thought I was listening to Ayreon’s The Dream Sequencer. Indeed, the atmosphere of the whole album reminds me a lot of Ayreon’s music, at least on The Dream Sequencer since that’s the only one I own. As for the music, it’s more progressive music than gothic music and all the songs are long epics that clock between seven and ten minutes. The progressive elements play the leading role in their music, and that’s part of the weakness of this album. Most of the songs on the record lack the excitement of other progressive gothic metal acts such as Myriads. Almost all of the songs are filled with rich, complex melodies, but the music is very repetitive due to the length of the songs.

The band features both the female and male clean vocals of Julie and Andras (with very few raw male vocals) as in Lacuna Coil, and I don’t think they reach the intensity of Cristina and Andrea from the coilers. The voice of Julie is above average, but she can’t root the listener out of the monotony of the music.

All in all, it’s an average album and since the standard in gothic metal is quite high compared to other metal genres, I can only give an average quotation to this record.