Mandrake
The Balance of Blue
4
Wow, another band trying to incorporate a female vocalist in metal. How wonderful! The vocals are fair, very reminiscent of Dolores O'Riordan from The Cranberries. This album is well produced, but the music is not nearly as progressive as other reviewers have made it out to be. The cover art work seems like something completely inspired from a Nuclear Blast Germany Catalog. Ironically enough, Mandrake is from Germany.
This album seems very uninspired. The vocals are good, but very monotone in key, it is as if there is no emotion presented by the lead vocalist. The instrumentation is decent, but I just sit here relatively bored with The Balance of Blue. It takes until the third song, which is nearly 15 minutes into the album to get any vocal variation. Mandrake goes from clean female vocals, to clean male vocals, how original, guys. It then precedes to get heavier and there is some gruff vocals. The guitarwork on here is nowhere near progressive, just simplistic chords structures over basically doom style drums. God, I could only get through 30 minutes of this!
I don't particularly have much more to say about this album other than it's very boring, time consuming, and redundant. Thank you for taking the time to listen to me finally bitch about something that I do not like. Granted, this isn't my favorite style of music to begin with, but there had to be some point when this album was about to be made where someone in this band said to someone else, "what direction are we trying to go here?"
I have a feeling that fans of this style might find this album somewhat typical. I would more than likely agree with them. This album is geared towards fans of Nightwish, old The Gathering, and maybe Evanescence. Even if this album was marketed towards that particular demographic, it seems belittling to think anyone would pay money for it. I don't want to really listen to the rest of this album for fear that i might wind up doing something productive like Pilates, laundry, or watching The O.C. Avoid this album, there are better bands out there for this style of music.
