Tad Morose - Matters Of The Dark
(Century Media)The pride of Bollnas, Sweden (Lefay as co-pride), Tad Morose return with a plush, elegant, and quite smooth and accessible expression of the band's distinctly timeless power prog. Urban Breed's vocals, once again, cause surge and uplift in the proceedings, the man addressing all sorts of diverse dark topics, linked only by their foreboding unease. Indeed, two tracks look at the undemocratic workings of the European union, and another, New Clear Skies, is sung from the point of view of a cruise missile! Musically, the spread is unsurprisingly top-notch, recorded with sterling acumen, riffs cutting scythe-like through a selection of songs that really only find similarity in the doomy gothic power metal of Nocturnal Rites, Evergrey, Memento Mori or Lefay, the last with which Tad Morose shares rehearsal space and back-to-back recording studios.
Rating 7.5Nightmare - Cosmovision
(Napalm)Highly embarrassing case of old French geezers (born in '79; two albums in the mid '80s; reformed in '99) trying to bring what was once their own out of fashion power metal sound into the rat's nest of raised elbows that is the scene today. Jo Amore's lead vocals are awful and awfully nasal, and worse because you can hear the laughable second language English words he's on about. Here's some titles: Riddle In The Ocean, Corridors Of Knowledge and Behold The Nighttime; draw your own conclusions about the linguistic stumbles therein enclosed and amplified deeper into the lyrics. Production is way slick and fakey with bad keyboard decisions buzzing the clatter. Major pantload of power fromage past its wine and dine date. On the upside: a big semi-headline hit at the New Jersey Metalfest.
Rating 4
