French Symphonic metal band Whyzdom are back with a new singer and a follow up to their 2009 debut album ”From The Brink Of Infinity”. For this new album Whyzdom have signed with Scarlet records and will be releasing Blind? at the end of October 2012.
On their debut album, singer Clémentine Delauney was excellent, so after she left to tour with Serenity I must admit to having some doubts as to what the new album would sound like. Happily though Whyzdom have found an equally brilliant singer in Elvyne Lorient, and any doubts I had vanished almost immediately when I started listening to this new album. In my opinion, Elvyne’s vocals are excellent – polished and beautiful, but vocals are one of those areas where it really comes down to personal taste – what one person may love, another may not like. For me her vocals work very well but some people might prefer a more powerful classical vocalist along the Tarja Turunen lines.
The music is great too – you’ve got a good strong heavy metal base with good solid drumming and some excellent guitar work. Layered on top of this metal base is the orchestration. The orchestral parts add a lot of richness and extra power to the music. The use of a choir has a similar effect – adding extra depth and richness, but it’s been nicely done, using the choir in certain places where it can add the most value and not using it in other places.
There certainly seems to be a theme going on with the albums songs and the album title – one of sight or blindness. Take ”Cassandra’s mirror” – Cassandra was a character in mythology who had the gift of prophecy (or foresight), so there’s a clear link to ”The Foreseer”, and ”The lighthouse” again has links to sight, this time physical rather than mental, and of course the album title fits this theme. I suspect if you were to look at the lyrics for some of the other songs then other links to the theme would become clear.
It’s a long album – eleven tracks doesnt sound that unusual, but with the shortest of these being over five minutes and the longest being ten and a half minutes long then the album clocks up a running time of around 75 minutes which is very long compared to most albums – in the days of vinyl that would be a double album.
So, the key question – how good an album is it? Well if I tell you that I’ve already ordered my copy that should answer your question – it’s a great symphonic metal album that any fan of the genre should listen to.
Whyzdom are:
Elvyne Lorient – Vocals
Vynce Leff – Guitar, Orchestration
Regis Morin – Guitar
Xavier Corrientes – Bass
Nico Chaumeaux – Drums
Marc Ruhlmann – Keyboard
Track listing:
1. The lighthouse
2. Dancing with Lucifer
3. Cassandra’s mirror
4. On the road to Babylon
5. Paper princess
6. The spider
7. The wolves
8. Venom and frustration
9. Lonely roads
10. The Foreseer
11. Cathedral of the damned
