SIÉGE PERILOUS

This is the first Kamelot album that features Roy Khan on vocal and Casey Grillo on drum. While it’s not as good as any of what they would have accomplished later (starting from ‘The Fourth Legacy and so on), it’s not really a bad effort at all. You can consider this as a new starting point of what they’ve become nowadays.

As for the tracks:

‘Providence’ actually is a quite good opening track for this album. This song has a rather slow tempo, and while it’s not a ballad song, it’s not too metal either. ‘Millennium’ has a nice opening piano melody, and the band start to kick out some speedy riffs and drumming here. ‘King’s Eyes’ has a bit slower tempo, and this is probably among the proggiest track in this album, though it’s not really a proggy track at all. There’s a nice short acoustic break in the middle part of the song.

‘Expedition’ starts off with some rather speedy riffs, but only in the beginning. The overall tempo of this song isn’t that fast at all. In the middle of the song, you’ll hear some good guitar solos. ‘Where I Reign’ has a quite nice opening melody by some kind of woodwind instrument. Another track with medium tempo which has some good guitar solos. The melody of this song, among with the vocal make it sounds like a sad, depressing song.

I’m not going to go through the details of the rest of tracks here, since most of them have some similarities in their atmosphere and sounds. Not that all the tracks here sounds exactly the same, they have their own moments like the guitar solos in ‘Rhydin’, the keyboard sounds in of ‘Parting Visions’, or the ballad song ‘Once in a Dream’, etc. However the overall sounds is a bit generic. This album closing track, ‘Siege’, is an instrumental track, something that they haven’t done before. This track is probably the highlight of the album! It has some great solos, nice acoustic parts, and some others. It’s a bit short though, and I think it would be nice if this track could go on a bit longer.

The tracks here aren’t bad at all, but nothing really stands out either. This album is mostly, if not all, consists of only mediocre tracks. Roy Khan’s vocal here is far from his best, which would improve a lot in their next albums. The sound quality of this album doesn’t help either. While it’s not a really horrible production, it still categorized as an awful one and thus become another downfall of the album.

Overall, this isn’t a bad album at all like I’ve pointed out above. This album isn’t really sounds like a plain power metal album; in fact, there aren’t many speedy tracks here, most of them have a medium tempo. This album sounds more like a symphonic metal album, though it’s not really prog at all. Obviously, if you’re new to Kamelot’s sounds, you’d like to avoid this album and get their latest works first. You can get this album after you already familiar with their discography and curious about how’s their earlier works sound like. I'd give this album 5 out of 10 or two and a half stars.