Virtuocity
Northern Twilight Symphony
4.2
A mixture of progressive metal and more progressive metal, Virtuocity plays a pretty straightforward brand of music. Sounding much like Vanishing Point or Royal Hunt (never heard of em? There’s a reason for that), they bring only leftovers to the dinner table.
The opening 3 seconds of this album was almost interesting, simply because the album was called Northern Twilight Symphony and it almost sounded like it was gonna be Finnish speed metal. Such was not the case. The painfully generic vocalist came in with absolutely no emotion or energy, droning on this way for the entire album. Not only were the vocals just enragingly boring, but the lyrics were goddamn trite and hackneyed. Here’s a couple of samples:
“If I fly with wings of dawn, you’ll be there with wings of dawn”
”I always will be forever young, now and forever”
”We raise our swords, we raise it up to the sky!”
”When the sword is shining high, I’ll kill the dragon of the sea!”
This coupled with stupid, predictable melodies is too much for me to handle. The main problem here is that they don’t dare to try anything spectacular. At least some bands REALLY suck, then the reviewing public can absolutely tear into their crappiness. A band like this is so horribly forced and fake; this lack of inspiration translates into a boring review.
Run-of-the-mill bands like this amaze me. They make me wonder how in god’s name they acquired distribution on their sub-par albums, and why they even bother if they’re going to be so sickeningly generic. If you’ve made it this far into the review, I applaud your stick-to-itiveness. The only redeeming quality here was the synth-harpsichord soloing, but too bad it’s usually backed by a cheesy synth-string section.
If you’re like me and you skip to the end of a review when you don’t care, here’s a gift: DON’T BUY THIS ALBUM.
The sound of me clicking “stop”
