Scar For Life
3 Minute Silence

If you listen to these Portuguese guys you will probably find yourself scarred for life, unless of course you remain silent for three minutes in order to lure them away with some kind of diversion. Or maybe I am just imagining things again? what I do know is that it is the third album by these guys and that it is supposed to be their most diverse to date, and it features a new singer as the other one left because of some differences in direction for the band to take. But don’t despair good chaps, as the new singer is supposed to have a unique, powerful and very versatile voice and the album shall be the most varied to date as well so it would appear that they are evolving into something new in comparison to what they have already done before. The cover art surely makes this an album that appears interesting at the face of it, so now lets reason over what it contains and if it is worth you wile.

First of all to try and describe this album’s musical intricacies and variations is like trying to build a log cabin using only gravel, almost impossible and at least you need to invent something completely new to succeed so it is not doable as it is. Diverse is a word one can use. Melodic, rock, metal, growls, piano, strings, guest musicians, screams, dark, light, moody, soft, beautiful, aggressive, doomy, great voice are some of the other words that would probably feature if I were to try and describe it. The new singer is as far as I can tell a perfect fit for this band and the music that they play, he manages to carry the songs really well, and just for shows they have some help screaming and growling and also from the singer of Catamenia to be a guest of honour on one of the tracks. The sound is excellent and keeps this album together despite the enormous variation seen over the near one hour that it goes on before the instrumental track that ends it fades away. Lets just say that if it was a journey it would be one through all kinds of environments, I even saw a polar bear along the way today.

This album has been very well reviewed so far, although most was in gibberish coming to language so I didn’t really understand them but there was one in English and that was excellent as well. It may not really deserve the full marks like ten of ten that some reviewer(s) awarded it but it surely deserves a high rating as it is a great album, so much passion and emotion from the singer, so complex and varied to go through and in the end you leave feeling that you have heard something really fine. The songs are all good and range from beautiful and soft to aggressive and growly, best are they in the mid tempo songs that aren’t that powerful, like the title track which I love and Old Man is another one that leaves a big impression. But they are all quite good I would conclude now after having played through this album well over a dozen times.

The only little weakness, and that is a small one comparable to a dwarf next to the the Taipei 101, is that it feels a bit like a long album towards the end. I think the instrumental ending is good but they should have ditched the first and eleventh track to make it a bit more compact. But as I said it is a tiny problem to be honest, and it is not even close to those albums where you start deleting songs in the iTunes to make the album bearable.

So, the journey through this album is an exciting one and when it is done you can just sit back and relax and take it all over again, until you are an old man (or woman just to keep the feminists happy despite it ruining the wordplay).
Bottom line: it is worth looking into this album as it is great.