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Feathers & Flesh

Swedish avatars are returning with their sixth album, a conceptual album about an owl going to war with the world to prevent the sun from rising – how amazing does that sound? So ladies and gentlemen, it sounds fantastic to me, and it comes in a brilliant package with a 109 page hardcover book and double vinyl in colour, how brilliant is that? But it costs quite a lot so if it isn’t what it promises, it would be a waste of money. But can an album that looks that cool and has that cool concept really be bad? Well, read on and I will give my verdict.

Musically we have a long album, fourteen tracks plus two bonus tracks (at least on the review thing I got) and over an hour of playing time, that is quite a lot to take in but as it is a conceptual album it tells a story. I have to say though, that the story isn’t really obvious at all when telling the story – something of a negative when you make a conceptual album. Musically they span a fairly wide variety of music, from the niceties to the more extreme stuff. I think they sound a bit like the band Sunflower Dead that I reviewed last year, a good thing is that they don’t sound like everything else and that their album is well produced.

Outstanding opening of the album and I started thinking: wow, this is really good. But then I got to the end and a gorilla started throwing barrels at me, no wait that was something else… what I meant was that the end was actually quite poor. It starts out as a five or six pointer on out scale but ends in the weaker three-pointer region. So how can one rate an album with two such different faces? Great then drab, the bonus tracks are really poor by the way but they are bonus tracks so they can be overlooked. I think that the album balances between the great and the not so great and in the end I think it deserves a rating exactly in the middle of the scale – maybe I can just keep the best and toss the rest in the garbage.

So is it worth getting that cool package? Personally I don’t think so but as it is quite interesting creatively and has a good span of music styles I think it can be interesting, especially if you enjoy this band’s earlier works. Kind of like a case of what could have been, because it is really great when I listen to The Eagle has Landed but then it ends on a moot point which is why I have to weigh the sides of the album against each others which always makes an album difficult to diagnose – my diagnosis is though that it is a fantastically interesting concept but it is too bad that the music is just slightly above average.

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