Review Summary: Powerful, beautiful masterpiece, my favorite album of all time.
Still Life. An absolute journey, an atmospheric, beautiful album of pure greatness. I could just go on and on giving adjectives on what I think of this album...but let me just go through each track.
The Moor: This song starts out with a little minute and a half ambient build up of guitar notes that work perfectly as an intro, and show that with this song specifically you're up for a progressive adventure. Followed by a well placed acoustic section, this song then goes right into the heaviness with great powerful riffs, lyrics that start the loose yet great story of the album throughout most of the song. The first appearance of clean vocals is a part I truly love. Personally I think Mike's best clean performance is on this album, (though that might be because of how much I just love this album). The song eventually goes into a soft part, using great guitar chords, and great playing making the acoustic passage in the song truly amazing. All in all The Moor is a great progressive metal song, building up, getting heavy, and going soft again then ending with heaviness. A simple yet great song structure if you ask me.
Godhead's Lament: After the great time changes and journey of The Moor, this song jumps right in with great riffs, and death metal awesomeness. Also going into a softer section, Godhead's Lament is simply another great song.
Benighted: After two 10 minute death metal epics, Benighted takes it back with great acoustic playing, a beautiful atmosphere, and just a blueprint for how to do an acoustic song right, and unique, not just falling into the category of another acoustic song.
Moonlapse Vertigo: 2 heavy songs, a light one, now Moonlapse Vertigo perfectly blends the heaviness with the soft, and at 8 minutes, it's not too long yet just long enough for Moonlapse Vertigo to be a simply great song.
Face Of Melinda: Somewhat of a twist in the album (Though Still Life is definitely not predictable or generic), Face Of Melinda adds some jazzy elements and bass playing in the first half, continuing the story, and eventually going into a great heavy second half with a great main riff, overall another amazing, memorable song.
Another thing I wanted to mention, how memorable and different each song is from each other.
Serenity Painted Death/White Cluster: Ending the album with 2 more epics, Serenity Painted Death, and White Cluster are great songs with heavy and soft sections, ending an amazing album, great songwriting, great riffs, great well placed solos, great lyrics, and overall great songs.
Finally, Still Life is my favorite album of all time, filled with atmosphere, great and memorable songwriting, great production and sound, overall just amazing everything, a masterpiece if I've ever seen one.
