Review Summary: An album with lots of promise and potential, which was more or less realized on the band's following releases. Suffers of bad vocal lines and amateur production.
Into Eternity is one unique band. Having shifted on each album to the point of being almost unrecognizable from the previous one, they sure have attempted multiple ways of blending the deathy and the progressive. The band's leading member is the guitarist Tim Roth - somewhat of a megalomaniac, but overall a nice guy and a person who's been through a lot of ***, which reflects in his lyrics. I would now like to tell more about their somewhat under-appreciated debut album.
Into Eternity is a fiesta of badly produced good ideas. Particularly the vocals and keyboards sound like they were made in a home studio by an amateur producer (which probably did actually happen), and that's probably what has kept the album from garnering higher success, the production's plain awful. Tim Roth's first attempt at vocals is also bad - both on its own and compared to the outstanding later effort Dead or Dreaming. His vocal lines are painful in their lack of creativity and abundance of monotony, plus there's a very, very annoying reverb effect on all the cleans on this album, which makes it even worse. At least the growls are good, and would remain so on all the following albums while done by Roth.
Musically speaking, though, most of the songs are actually good, very good even. The opener Torn is one of those rare songs that seem ethereal in spite of the guitars and drums raging, definitely a good song. The follower Sorrow is sad yet simple, but enjoyable nevertheless. Left Behind is a song with a catchy chorus borrowing from classic heavy metal with some nice ideas crammed into it, especially in the guitars department. The Modern Day is somehow reminescent of the opener track, but with a more emotional chorus. The rest of the tracks are generally similar, but each stands out on their own, like the beautiful ballad A Frozen Escape, the ethereal yet surprisingly punchy tracks 7 and 10 and the heavy and energetic tracks 6 and 9. The title track is predictably one of the strongest points of the album, being simple yet powerful. In what would later repeat on Dead or Dreaming and The Scattering of Ashes, this album ends with lots of whacksmash, a way to end an album, if I do say so.
Also in an interesting yet somewhat unprofessional maneuver, Roth has intertwined the songs with many quotes from the legendary Tarantino movie Pulp Fiction and some other media, just a gimmick but worth mentioning. All in all this is a decent release, with the production and vocals only slightly to moderately detracting from the enjoyment of the listener. This self-released work deserves a kudos for trying and for the many good ideas it contains.
Recommended tracks:
Torn
A Frozen Escape
Into Eternity
Speak of the Dead
Silence Through Virtue(!)
