EMBRACE THE STORM

Yup the new excellent project from Arjen Anthony Lucassen features Marcela Bovio the Mexican singer from the last Arjen project; The human equation. This cd also features something so rare as a swedish female lead guitarist with clear inspiration from fellow countryman Yngwie Malmsteen...all in all a quite interesting project.

The first sample i heard from this album was Deceiver which i downloaded from the offical page and at first i found it a bit Nu-metallish and sounded too much like Evanescence and Nightwish and i was afraid that the whole album was going to turn out this way...fourtuneately i was wrong as it turned out this was the albums weakest track...

The first thing that strikes me is that this sounds like a combination of previous side projects from Arjen and mixes elements of both Ambeon and Star One quite nicely...and also a new thing to notice is that this album is completly without keyboards!!! That has to be a first for Arjen and instead you get a real piano and Cello's and violins's, OH MY!!! The overall feel of this album is not that that heavy and it is about 60% melodic and slow parts and 40% metallish parts, infact i find a quite nice blend as Marcelas best moments are when her voice can really shine over some beautiful piano riff like forexample the extraordinary Nostalgia which is sung in spanish. But also her voice works great on pieces like Passion which has a great dramatic element to it althouh it perhaps sound a bit power metallish. All in all there is not a single really weak track on this album and most of the songs manage to stay fairly original although you can recognize the typical Arjen compositary techniques. And also this is the first time in a long time where there is an actual band and by so you can expect some concerts from this band in 2006.

I got the special editon of this cd wich includes a DVD with a music video for passion and some demo's and some videos of the different musicians playing their parts. Unlike the Human Equation DVD which was really interesting and you could get an idea about the great process behind the album this is an really uniinteresting DVD which is not something that you would like to watch again...I frankly recommend to buy just the regular editon as this DVD provides nothing interesting.

Standout tracks: Passion, Nostalgia and Breathing Again

If you like this also try out: Ambeon and ofcourse The Human Equation by Ayreon