DEAD OR DREAMING

Dead or Dreaming is the second full-length studio album by Canadian metal act Into Eternity. This was my first encounter with the band which is good because as I retrospectively reviewed their debut I found one of the most awful releases I have yet encountered here on Prog Archives. The debut is a tame, emotionless, badly produced, badly written and generic metalcore/ soft melodic death metal album IMO and I gave it a deserved 1 star rating. The only thing I partially enjoyed on that album was the musicianship. Things have fortunately changed for the better here on Dead or Dreaming.

The music is melodic death metal/ metalcore with both clean singing and a few growling vocal parts. The song structures are generally very simple vers/ chorus build but there are a few surprises along the way. The clean vocal parts dominate the music and they are very memorable. The music is very melodic and keyboards mean that the music gets a kind of pop metal touch.

The musicianship is really good. Some sharp riffing and tight interplay means that there are a couple of sections on an otherwise trivial affair that makes me bang my head.

The production is allright but it doesn´t stand out as something special. The songs have a tendency to become background noise and I think a more interesting production might have done the trick ( well not all the trick. But at least it would have helped).

Dead or Dreaming is a very polished metal album that at times sounds almost radio friendly. I have nothing against accessibility but this album fails to produce any really good songs. There´s just something missing. Emotion maybe? As such I could give this album a 3 star rating because it´s rather average but on the other hand something just isn´t right here and I don´t enjoy the album one bit ( well one bit more than the debut which is an improvement) and I will therefore only rate it with 2 stars. Good tight musicianship and seemingly memorable songs don´t always make an album great when emotion is missing.