Review Summary: A great debut album.
Cyclamen is a project formed by Hayato Imanishi in 2008 which is essentially a Progressive Metal band. Their back catalouge is pretty slim, with only a couple of EPs, a demo and this album.
Going off just this album, the band show great potential; 12 tracks that feel like a crazy journey from start to finish.
The album as a whole is very varied in sound and never quite sticks to one style. You'll notice there is a well balanced amount of songs that go from in-your-face heavy, to Envy/Mogwai epic style tracks that keep hold of your interested.
Opening track "Mother" is basically a build up track that quickly moves on to the hard hitting metal track "The Seeker": heavy screams mixed with some nice vocal melodies, with some absolutely mental guitar work under it all. Using these two tracks as examples, this is the basic structure of Senjyu.
Senjyu is a debut that is basically trying to showcase what the band - or Hayato Imanishi, as it's his band - can do. Most tracks have eye-popping fret wankery with a pretty impressive variation on vocal work.
But this is where some maybe alienated, as essentially this album has no real direction or goal and the tracks feel more like a random collection of songs than an album trying to keep to some sort of continuity. Weighing in at 38 minutes 6 seconds it also means it doesn't have a lot of time to tell you what its trying to either. It certainly left me wishing it had been a bit longer. A couple more heavy tracks would have definitely filled the void.
Having said all that though, every song on this album is extremely entertaining. And if you like your music technical with plenty of variety, you'll definitely enjoy the ride.
Senjyu know's it isn't trying to be the best album on the earth. The goal for this debut is it's making sure it has your full attention, and it definitely does that. This album shows signs of what could be amazing things to come.
Well worth checking out.
