Atlantis Chronicles
Barton's Odyssey

This is the second chapter of the French chronicles about Atlantis, the second Atlantis related album I review in a short while – the first one was good but not that great so what about this one? It has a great artwork so that is a fine thing to begin with, but what about the music from this French quintet? It is an odyssey of Otis Barton that is taking us to places in and around the sea.

It starts with a narration, narration that reoccurs at some places throughout the album. Musically it starts all melodic and such but then moves into more death metallic stuff, technical death metal to be more precise. The vocals are quite drab, I think death metal in general needs more dynamic vocals and this isn’t really an exception to that. But the album itself is rather varied and tells its story in a rather interesting way, which compensates for the lack of interesting vocals. The narration is good even if the words sometimes could be better.

I think that it is a rather good album in most regards, as I state the vocals are not brilliant and they are not exactly what you can call unique in their musical approach. But they do what they do well and you hear that these guys have potential for making great stuff but don’t really do that with this release. It is an album that shows glimpses of greatness but in the end it becomes a rather stagnant album that sits exactly in the middle of our rating scale.

Ten good songs, none that really stand out is what we hear when listening to this album. It works and fans of the genre will probably find it agreeable but I also doubt that anyone will really find it that fantastic. They do what they do fairly well but there are many bands that does that and also some that does it a whole lot better and that is why I cannot really blindly recommend it, it is an okay but not a great album.

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