Stonelake
Monolith

I was made aware of this band about a year and a half ago when I received their latest album Marching on Timeless Tales, it was a very positive surprise to me in many ways. Not only was the album very good, the cover was cool and everything about the album felt quite interesting. Now it is time again, this new and coming album is called Monolith and it has an uglier album cover, which is not ugly but quite dull to be honest. Not a good sign, is it? But then again the Swedes may have more up their sleeves then just a dodgy looking album cover, they have two new members in the band and they are a year and a half wiser and on the latest album they did show some great musical skills and ideas, which is something that should work in favour of this new album. But does it?

The musical style is a heavier kind of power metal which is a bit as the previous album but this one is quite a bit spiced up with progressive elements and structural parts of the songs making it a bit more of a progressive power metal album I suppose. The songs are still mostly midtempo but they are heavier than the previous album meaning that this album is a quite heavy album. The production is massive, such a rich sound and all of that which they have sounds fairly impressive and exciting. The singer is an excellent fit for the type of music and the riffing is with fantasy and variation in the songs as is the small keyboard elements that spice up all the songs. It is an album quite rich in such keyboard things, but even with this variation in the songs, the songs themselves tend to blend together into a mass that is hard to make out where you are in. It is a strange thing but if I didn’t look at the tracklist I would have thought there were three or four long tracks on the album rather than ten.

I would say that this album is a pair of steps backwards in comparison with the predecessor. It is better produced, better performed and better in every single way, except one. The songs are not as good, it feels like they haven’t really made an effort with the songs and just focused on making it sound as good as possible as long as they had something decent to play. I am sure that is not the case, I cannot imagine that someone would be lazy to just jot some notes down and just rely on the production and playing skill and then hope every listener is so dumb that he/she cannot hear how little effort they made. I cannot imagine that it is the case with these guys, I suppose the songs just didn’t come together well enough even though I imagine that they themselves think that they did.

Anyway, despite the kind of averageness of the songs it is still a good album, it has a great sound and performance and it is listenable but considering what they did last time around it is still a bit of a disappointment and had I bought their latest album I would not buy this one come friday. Still, I guess you should look it up if you like the band but you have been forewarned.

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