POLES

Factory of Dreams is the latest brainchild of Portuguese multi-instrumentalist Hugo Flores.

Fans of Project Creation will find many similar elements on this release; but this time around Flores has teamed up with a female vocalist who gets to handle all voice and vocal duties; and the album is much more of a pure-bred prog metal exploration.

Dramatic and melo-dramatic compositions is the name of the game here; massive synth layers with symphonic leanings; drawn out massive chords and mostly slower riff patterns fleshing out the sound; loops and electronic rhythms used extensively and operatic vocals placed on top.

Well produced and well performed; but too much focus on big contrasts and too few finer details ultimately makes me regard this as an album that should appeal to fans of power metal as well as followers of a project like Ayreon; with a younger audience as the suspected primary target crowd.

I´m still wondering why they labeled this portuguese duo as neo prog. Factory Of Dreams leans much more towards the prog metal/gothic path than anything else. it´s quite nice music for sure, but don´t expect anything even close to neo prog because you won´t find it on Poles. I liked the voice of Jessica Lehte, she is surely a trained singer with good vocal technique and a nice timbre, even if her style is quite common place nowadays.

Hugo Flores is also a very good musician and knows how to write some interesting tunes. Most songs are slow or middle paced affairs, with lots of multi-tracked, full of effects vocal parts, symphonic synths, metallic edge guitars and some eletronic drums. The results are good, but not very outstanding. In fact they do very little more than dozens of other bands are doing, except maybe for some extra care for the atmospheric parts. Pretty cover, too.

I recommend this CD to the fans of Xandria, Evanescence, Within Temptation and the like. Poles is promising, the duo have the potential and maybe they can bring something more original in future works. For this one, 3 stars. Good, bot nothing more than that.