Another Life

Memories from Nothing

Written by: NB on 19/12/2008 18:32:06

The progressive-metal and rock band Another Life was formed by Andreas Karlsson. In fact he recently left death-metal band Paganizer to do so. Now I'm not the biggest fan of Paganizer, but even I think this was a mistake.

Now, it can't be said that his vocals on this album aren't unique. But originality isn't all listeners care about. There's a reason no other vocalist sounds like this; it's because it sounds awful. It can only be described as someone who doesn't have a particularly deep or powerful voice trying to sound like Tom Jones, Pavarotti or Whiplasher Bernadotte.

Don't think that the lyrics will make the album worth listening to either: they are truly banal. "What rhymes with 'firstborn'? How about 'Unicorn'? 'Just like the firstborn... Unicorn!' yeah that'll do; that can be our chorus for track four and it's title". Great.

In the first track on the album the only thing more annoying than the vocals is the ridiculous keyboard line (provided by the only other member of the band: Dan Swanö). Luckily the melody in some of the later songs is more acceptable. It's still a pretty dated sound with the worst elements from almost all of the preceding decades, but takes itself too seriously for this to be funny. Some of the songs start out well only to be relegated to mediocrity by a bog standard hard rock guitar riff. One such song, "Everlasting", is actually the best song on the album, which doesn't say much for the rest of the tracks.

"The Everflow", the penultimate track, is where the 'progressive' adjective is finally abandoned entirely. This consists of a single, stale hard rock riff repeated over and over with a quiet organ sound over the top followed by a very generic solo. I didn't even want to listen to the last song, but I did, just for the sake of completeness; it's bad too.

4

Download: The End of Days, Everlasting
For the fans of: Scar Symmetry, Arcturus, Beautiful Sin
Listen: MySpace

Release date 10.11.2008
Vic Records

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