Towersound
Self Titled
6.4
Founded five years ago in an age of mist and magic long past, the three brothers Jean-Christophe, Laurent, and Florian came up with their odd name as a reference to the tower adjacent to their home in the Cantal region of France. Opening with a pleasant acoustic madrigal accompanied by breathy synths, pipe organ and ancient sounding animal hide drums Towersound make no effort whatsoever to disguise the intentions of their heavy metal ministrations. With song titles like “Devils of the Night” “Enchanted Alloy” and “Misty Lands” there are pretty much only two directions this album can go. Luckily, the three gentlemen from France avoided the pitfalls of uber cheese flower metal and instead laid down what could rightly be called a traditionalist’s wet dream.
Though the album is a treat its recording tends to hinder the goals a bit; allow me to weave a web of images. Picture if you will an old stone well set in a tranquil feudal hillside. Now, to get an accurate vision of how the instruments on this album were recorded, imagine that everyone in the band excluding the vocalist keyboard player are stuck inside that well. The vocalist and his less prominent partner in volume are standing triumphantly outside this endless hole belting out in powerful fashion while you the audience are stuck straining a bit to hear what is going on down in depths.
Recording technique can only hinder the physical sound of an album though because the band’s spirit for this style comes through loud and clear. Epic and ambitious both in lyric and scope, the songs are a catchy and intriguing listen for several reasons: The shockingly well written English lyrics are performed by a vocalist who sounds like Mathew Barlow at his best during the peak of Iced Earth’s career. Though it may suffer from the previously mentioned recording flaws the lead guitar work manages to be simultaneously tasteful and bombastic and a stylistic comparison to Cirith Ungol would not be inappropriate. For all their bravado the band never let their writing slip into a ham fisted cheese fest. Even I, a staunch death metal fan, did not roll my eyes once during the record’s duration.
Really what we have here is material committed to disc in a somewhat amateur fashion by men whose hearts were exactly in the right place. None among you who dare to wear denim and leather would speak ill of this earnest work. Towersound is a charming album full of character that can only grow on fans of traditional melodic heavy metal.
