Review Summary: A very melodic, catchy and driving power metal album with female vocals.
The only country that I think has a unique set of metal bands alongside Sweden has to be Finland. And why do I think that? Because Finland does not only export one certain style of metal, just take a look at Norway for example. Norway is probably the only country that exports tremendous amounts of black metal. Sweden is also pretty good at churning out quality death metal but Finland is a bit more special. We have for example the well establishsed
Children Of Bodom, the legendary
Nightwish, the monster crew
Lordi,
Kalmah,
Insomnium and many other bands.
Alexi Laiho is the frontman of
Children Of Bodom and I wondered if he was or had been playing in other bands. I checked and he has been playing guitars in a black metal band called
Impaled Nazarene, not interesting since I don’t like black metal that much. But he had been playing in a power metal band as well, and that band is called
Sinergy.
Sinergy happens to be a project lead by a female vocalist and keyboardist named
Kimberly Goss.
Kimberly Goss and
Alexi Laiho were actually a couple if you didn’t knew that, they married in 2002 but they separated in 2004.
Sinergy is a power metal band, they have yet released three full-length albums but their status is tempurary unknown. The music is very energetic, heavy and at times atmospheric. You can notice that small influences from both
Nightwish and
Children Of Bodom, this makes this band somewhat unique or interesting because of
Alexi’s style of guitar playing, the well executed keyboards and the slightly half aggressive attitude which is present in the music.
If you haven’t heard anything from a band that you have never heard of you would have a hard time to an album since the albums might not sound familiar to each other. I thought I could try out their first album which is called
Beware The Heavens which was released in 1999. One reason why I thought this album seemed interesting was that
Alexi Laiho and
Jesper Stromblad (yes, guitar player from
In Flames) were the guitarists. And since I love female vocalists I just had to listen if this was an angel singing, well, it wasen’t the greatest singer I have heard but
Kimberly has a very good voice.
Beware The Heavens is claimed to have lots of influences from the english heavy metal sound (think
Iron Maiden). As any power metal album this album is very melodic, it has good portions of speed and energy, it is heavy due to the great sound quality and the variety of the song material is great.
The Warrior Princess and
Venomous Vixen are some intense tracks with crazy guitar work and rampaging drum work. There are two short instrumental tracks,
Born Under Fire And Passion and
Pulsation. We have a sad but quite strong and atmospheric ballad called
Razor Blade Salvation. As you can see there is a wide selection of different tracks and none of them makes the album one-dimensional or repetitive.
Kimberly Goss is the vocalist in this album and she works also as a keyboardist. She doesn’t really stands out and that is because of her vocals, I’m not saying that she can’t sing but I found her vocals a bit...odd. Take
Tarja Turunen from
Nightwish and remove the opera essense from her vocals and you should have a pretty good description of the vocals in this album. Her vocals are not weak, the vocals are great but in this album she seems to be a bit laid back and doesn’t deliver her ultimatly best. The keyboards are not used as much as you would expect, the keyboards are mostly used to create a good atmosphere and texture in the tracks but there are not many stand outs. You will still though experience some nice finger dexterity so don’t worry, she handles the keyboards with great skill.
Alexi Laiho and
Jesper Stromblad are (and was) the two guitarists, (Jesper did only guitars in this album). Anyway, here you will experience a very wide selection of different riffs, rhythms, leads and solos. If you listen carefully you can actually seperate the guitarists by there style of playing guitars.
Alexi has a more technical, carzy and kind of futuristic style while
Jesper has a deeper and more norse sounding style. If you look at the overall guitar work you have melodic and heavy riffing, screaming and technical soloing and some tremolo riffing actually. In other words, a very diverse guitar performance which is performed by some of metals most well-known guitarists.
Sharlee D’Angelo was the bass player, even if he has been playing in lots of famous bands (bands like
Arch Enemy and
Dismember to mention two) he doesn’t shine in this album. I’m sorry to say that the bass fades away because of the two mighty guitars.
Ronny Milianowicz was the drummer in this album. As the other crew members he also delivers an excellent performance. Here we have some drum patterns that are ‘’classic’’ within the power metal genre (galloping drumming), the double bass kicking is here and many other sorts of technical and simple drum patterns.
This was a very good album, probably one of the best power metal albums I have heard yet. I liked almost everything this album had to offer, the guitar performance is probably the thing I enjoy the most. Other than that the album had a great sound, a great song variety and there was a good flow in all the songs. The whole album felt somewhat refreshing and modern but there were a few things that bothered me. I thought that
Kimberly didn’t delivered as much as the other members, her singing felt a bit too calm compared to the instruments. She still has a powerful and good singing voice but I wanted more. The second thing was just a few errors in some guitar solos. At times it sounded like the strings were slicing each other and it made a bad sound, it didn’t ruin the solos but it just sounded bad. I just have to say that if you like Finnish power metal or power metal with female vocals then you
will like
Sinergy. ‘’Bodom’’ fans could take a look at this because the music has some small similarities, most because of
Alexi’s guitars.
Positives
+ Energetic and catchy material
+ Excellent guitar work, the better of two worlds (Children Of Bodom + In Flames)
+ Great song variety
+ Very good sound quality
Negatives
- Kimberly’s vocals could’ve been a little bit stronger and perhaps a bit more aggressive
Recommended Favourites
-- The Warrior Princess (
Highly Recommended)
-- Razor Blade Salvation (
Highly Recommended)
-- Virtual Future
This album will be given a 4/5.
