Some time ago I discovered a band called Elysion. They’re a greek heavy metal band with a bit of a Goth tone and fronted by a female vocalist. So similar in style to bands like Evanescence or Lacuna Coil. I enjoyed their album Silent Scr3am, though it wasn’t particularly strong. It was pretty basic, in fact, but it had some rather catchy tunes that just really stuck with me.

For a debut effort, I figured the band had room to grow. So when I found out they had a new album, well, I was pretty excited. I was even more excited when I got to hear the first track on the album, which had a very different feel to it.

What most excited me was the multiple layers of Christianna’s vocals. As the song progresses she adds more and more, culminating in a large crescendo of vocals at the end. I felt like the band would be taking greater advantage of the studio now that they’ve released an album and had more experience.

As I listened, the third track also struck me in a very positive fashion.

One of the issues I run into with power metal bands is that the verses feel like filler. The real hooks are in the chorus and guitar solos, and the verse only exists to pad time until it’s appropriate to have a chorus again. Yet here, the verses are the draw. The rhythm that Christianna sings is what pulls you in and draws you into the beat, easily getting hooked into your head.

Yet with each of these songs, we also get a sneak at what the overall problem will be.

Here, let’s select a song from later in the album, about halfway.

And now towards the end.

Have you picked up on it yet? Or are you already a bit bored? Did your mind begin to wander?

With the exception of one acoustic track, pretty much every song sounds like that. Each song has a very similar sound, and when you’re going from one track to the next, it becomes rather difficult to differentiate them apart in your mind. True, each song has some small detail to try and set itself apart, but they all fall into a lot of similar traps.

The first issue I have is that each song is roughly the same tempo as the other. With my normal tastes, the issue tends to more frequently be that each song is focused on being fast, that each song has to be relentlessly shredding the guitar while the double-bass pedal pumps into your ears and shakes the floor. Here, the issue is that everything is at a “medium” sort of tempo. Not too fast, not too slow. I has enough of a beat without boring you, but also doesn’t require anything too complex from the musicians.

Which is the strongest problem. Perhaps it’s also the mixer, but it seems to me that all the instruments shined a lot better in the previous album, especially the synths. Here, however, it’s basically a duet between the vocalist and the rhythm guitar, yet all the rhythm guitar is doing from one song to the next is strumming up and down on the same handful of power chords. In fact, it seems as if the guitarist is married to only a handful of chords through the entire album, differentiating only by the timing and order in which the notes are strummed.

It could, of course, be the mixer as well. The band had a different mixer for their first album, and despite the same similarities in rhythm guitar performance, the first three tracks on Silent Scr3am still managed to differentiate themselves enough from each other. This is nothing to say of later songs on the album, such as “The Rules”, “Walk Away”

and, most of all, the very “Space Dye Vest” sounding “Erase Me”.

True, just about every song (but “Erase Me”) still fits into a simple formula. Open softly, explode with rhythm guitar, and then quiet to a bass and percussion line and vocals for the first verse. Yet the tempo will change, the emphasis on guitar or synths will change, and there is greater variance in each chorus.

Again, this could be more a matter of the mixing artist or producer making rather bland or unwise decisions. Yet even so, the new album on a whole lacks a creativity in execution. The vocal melodies don’t experiment much, but instead rely on your bog standard vocal work. The layering and experimentation found in the opening track does not appear, or at least as strongly, in any other song on the album. In the end, as you go from one song to the next, it all blends together into nothing more than a boring rhythm guitarist glued to the same basic chords.

I will likely listen to this album more in the future, but I will gradually taper off with only a handful of tracks to add to my regular playlist. Silent Scr3am, on the other hand, will continue to be listened to in full on occasion. I don’t regret my decision to purchase the full album, as for $10 I got two songs that I will listen to countless times throughout my life. However, I will be more cautious with their next album as I didn’t see much improvement.

Yet some of my favorite bands did not produce truly excellent albums, to me at least, until their third or fourth album. I just hope Elysion can take lessons from a band like Orden Ogan, whose most repetitive song still manages more variation with the rhythm guitar than all of Elysion’s Someplace Better album. Or Hell, if they can even manage to pull the energy and melodies that the horrible, cheesy, yet somehow wonderful Battle Beast can pull off.