Disillusion - Back To Times Of Splendor Review

Disillusion Back To Times Of Splendor

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Tracklist:
1. ... And The Mirror Cracked
2. Fall
3. Alone I Stand In Fires
4. Back To Times Of Splendor
5. A Day By The Lake
6. The Sleep Of Restless Hours

Ranking: #5 for 2004

user rating

4.3
superb

Chart.

other reviews

lanchege (5)
One of the best little-known bands out there....

Crimson (5)
Touching and powerful; chaotic while clear; moving and ruled by emotions; Back To Times Of Splendor ...

Kirgasm (4.5)
Back To Times of Splendor is a delight to any metal fans ears as it rages expertly through brutal, m...

mikem1234 (4.5)
Disillusion really proves that economical song-writing is compatible with epic prog-metal dynamics. ...

Crysis (3.5)
Looks can be deceiving....

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On 71 Lists

2.5
average

fireaboveicebelow USER (95 Reviews)

2009-10-27 | 39 comments | 803 views

7 of 9 thought this review was well written

The simple fact about most metal music, including the experimental side, is that a large majority of it is pretty bad. You can give this statistic for any genre, but unfortunately for metal, most people hear the worst parts of the scene (Trivium), or they hear one of the more abrasive bands, most commonly Cannibal Corpse, and completely disregard everything else because they don’t know any better. However, the experimental side is where you can tell the beginners from the seasoned listeners. Therein lies the Disillusion conundrum: they have the potential ability to compose progressive music, but their output is far from being unique, stylized, or convincing.

Right off the bat you can tell that the band is trying very hard to persuade a confidence with eastern-influenced prog-metal riffing, but you are also greeted with one of the many problems: a heavy “core” influence. Everything from the shouted vocals to the actual style of the verse riff continuing to a very predictable melo-death clean chorus is a clear statement of such. Now, while you can take that how you will, another issue that soon arises is the band’s inability, as a progressive act nonetheless, to write an inspired lead section. Once the clean break hits, the guitar plays possibly the most unimaginative lead I’ve ever heard, and worse yet the piano mimics it later. Continuing on this path of unconvincing music, basically all of Fall sounds like, not exactly contrived but, artificially developed genre switches. The band tries to go from a Tool-style mania to a theatrical acoustic section, and they do this throughout the song. The main issue with the theatrical element with the whole record (because they do beat the idea to death) is that, firstly, the acoustic guitars themselves sound cheap, which is unfortunate because some of the chord progressions are pretty nicely arranged.

Disillusion also has this irking knack for having fairly nice instrumental sections, such as the intro to the title track, but then jump back to the metalcore influence, which completely destroys any atmosphere set in the worst way. You can also see this in The Sleep Of Restless Hours, a 17 minute cluster*** where the band can’t decide whether or not they want to be heavy or pretty hinted by the constant changes from part to part that really have nothing to do with one another. Even though some of them stand out, the change-ups mess with the path the song never takes in the long run. And since I’m mentioning things that are out of place, the vocals, screaming or singing, have no compelling qualities. The screams, while you can argue they’re performed well, are incapable of pronouncing anything, allowing them to blend together at times. The clean vocals, which have often been compared to Serj Tankian, and while this is partially fair, they could only sound like Serj if Serj had no character. Furthermore the theatrical moments smothering the record do contain said clean vocals, and no they do not add to the theatrical element, but merely distract you.

When you find a band that does have talent as a unit, but tries too hard to be something special, you should know that they aren’t thinking about the right things when they’re composing. Also, just because a band is capable of writing a twenty minute song does not mean that it has a purpose. Sorry, Disillusion, you pretty much missed the mark.

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