Season of Dreams
Heroes

I wrote about Season of Dreams’ weak debut album last year, now they arrive with a new one. Since that debut guitarist John Nyberg has left the band leaving them a duo, with a decent guestlist for this album. Like the previous one it is the competent artist Stan W Decker that does the cover art, it is not one of his best. I do think it describes the theme of the album though, so in some regard it is a successful cover art. The album isn’t very successful though.

It fits into the power metal category, nothing special in regard to the style. High-pitched vocals, epic choirs and all those typical elements that are thrown into the mix when the metal is to be epic. No major difference from the previous album, and no surprises. There isn’t much in terms of variation, it is a static album that doesn’t offer much depth and dynamics. It appears pretty long when I listen through it, and I don’t see that they offer anything that is fresh or exciting.

It is probably not wrong to just copy-paste the stuff from the previous review, but there might be one or two things that are actually slightly better this time. But it is mostly pretty tame, it has some catchiness but way too little and the album fails to engage me as a listener and in the end I find myself drawn elsewhere as there are so many albums that are better than this one. Every musician who imagines that originality and fresh ideas isn’t a requirement to make great music is wrong, as wrong as these guys that unfortunately bring us one more pointless release of meaningless déjà vu packaged in a decent production.

I have heard this stuff before, and so have you, and way too many times already. So, who is it really for? Does the label imagine that anyone will actually buy this one? I guess they do as they release it, but how could anyone be impressed by something that sounds the same as the stuff that has been done to death already. To listen to something else when finishing up the work on this review I selected Destiny by Stratovarius and that kind of illustrates what I mean, I don’t think anyone will listen to this one in 2044 – if they listen to Destiny is another question but probably not even though it is a way better power metal album than this one. I think Season of Dreams will have to think differently if they want to be relevant, Heroes is anything but heroic.

HHHHHHH