Review Summary: Delusion more like confusion..
The UK doesn't have such a steady influx of good metal bands anymore. Yeah, granted the whole metal shtick started there, with the likes of your Led Zeppelins and Judas Priests and Black Sabbaths, and of course there is the famous New Wave of British Heavy Metal and then later all the doom bands such as My Dying Bride and Anathema, but when was the last good UK metal band formed? (No, DragonForce doesn't count.) Probably in the early 1990s. Well, To-Mera are from the UK (though they have a Hungarian vocalist, Ms Julie Kiss), and they are setting out to completely shatter that notion.
And the first thing you think when you hear To-Mera is: "what the hell are THESE guys and lass doing?" On the first spin, you'll find this disc to be an utter, utter mess. What abounds here is prog metal super de luxe, with just about every cliche you can find. Let's see, in the first three songs we find: overwrought neoclassical keyboards, Meshuggah-esque downtuned riffs, (mezzo?)-soprano female vocals with an ethereal quality, jazz interludes, even a part that sounds like what would happen if Portishead did a jig with Cynic. Time changes are abrupt and on-a-dime, with hairpin time signatures and tricky riffs flying off in random directions everywhere. It's one big spiraling helix of music, and one that will cause utter confusion for the inexperienced listener.
However, if you listen closely, you'll see that some of these songs have more musical structure than you expect at first glance. Opening track "The Lie" is the best example, where the first minute features no less than three time changes, but the riffs seem to stick together like they've been plastered by glue, and by the time Kiss's vocals come in, you're well underway to your first musical journey of the album. No matter that the chorus features blastbeats over an angelic vocal melody, or that two-and-a-half-minutes in, it feels like someone switched from the new To-Mera record to Portishead's Dummy, complete with Kiss doing her best Beth Gibbons impersonation. Somehow it seems glued within the framework of a real song, and all the different musical aspects seem to work.
However, we ain't just got Kiss switching from the high soprano wailings (Tarja Turunen, you've got company!) to sweet jazzy vocals, the band is just as esoteric as their vocalist. Glory of a New Day features a riff that is pure Meshuggah plagiarism, complete with the demented guitar tone that the Swedish buggers use, only unlike Meshuggah, the riff develops into 3000 different variations with all sorts of tangents before finally coming back to its original form at the end of the song, completing the cycle. In the meanwhile the drummer has had so many time changes to perform, you'd think he'd dropped dead. Keyboardist Hugo Sheppard and his compatriot on the guitars, Tom MacLean, trade insane riffs and solos all throughout the song like there's no tomorrow, and basically, the whole album is just one huge display of technical proficiency.
The downside: To-Mera, when they haven't found a sweet riff or a melody that sticks in your head, can be yawn-inducing to the max. The Lie is a brilliant song, but it runs for nigh-on 8 minutes, and by that time, a potential listener is already exhausted with everything To-Mera has to give. The issue is that this album from that point on turns into a big chaotic mess where 65 minutes of the madness is just
too much. Sure, there's enough musical and stylistic variation to keep the listener occupied, but the swirling atmospheric keyboards, stop-on-a-dime time changes, and downtuned guitar chuggathons complete with 80s-style-shred solos get inevitably boring halfway. They've just tried to cram too much on the album, and the record would have been infinitely better off if they trimmed song lengths, or just cut one or two songs out, as 40 mins or so would have done much more justice to the band's talent.
The album, though, is definitely progressive and innovative, despite adhering very much to a lot of "prog" aesthetics, mainly those pioneered by genre leaders Dream Theater and Symphony X. There is an appeal for fans of those bands and their ilk, and it is a recommended buy for anyone looking for some challenge in their music. But it's not an easy listen, and everyone who gets confused after just one minute, is definitely excused. I guess prog bands always need to learn a thing or two about songwriting...
