Review Summary: Lights From Oblivion is Adramelch's canvas, a place to test out new ideas and transition to a new phase in their illustrious career. However, it is still a test, and still needs refinement to truly shine.
Adramelch is not the band you remember them as. They were no longer content with the more traditional power/ progressive metal that gained them critical, if very niche, acclaim with Irae Melanox and the good, if somewhat inconsistent, Broken History. Instead, they decided to make a near complete turnaround with Lights From Oblivion. That isn’t to say that there are no signs of the past Adramelch scattered throughout the album, but they are few and far between. The opening track Lights is the closest they will ever get to the traditional power metal that made them popular. Interlaced with fun riffs and one of their better, post-Irae Melanox solos, the band keeps the chordal picking in the acoustic guitar and a slower verse and section, subtly mentioning that yes, this album will be different.
After Lights, tracks start losing their personality. Aelegia, despite being quite good, still feels like Lights part two, and generally fails to make much of an impression. This continues as only a few other tracks really separate themselves from the rest. The problem is, when you actually reach these songs, you can’t remember which one it is later, as they are surrounded by mediocrity. This isn’t to critique on the good songs, but just that even after listening to this album a bit while writing this review, I can only think of three songs that really stand out as really enjoyable, and two of them are at the beginning, the place where people, on average, remember better.
While it is difficult to pinpoint the truly great songs, the bad songs stick out like a sore thumb. Enter Wonderful Magician. Avoiding any of the wonder or magic that its title so boldly states, Wonderful Magician sits as a lump of boredom in an album of over stretched ideas. Even their singer, Vittorio Ballerio, almost always a positive despite his aging voice, sounds bored when singing about a Wonderful Magician. I know that I keep harping on this single song, it encapsulates my feelings towards a lot of this album. Not individual songs, but the permeating feeling in many songs that there is a lack of energy scattered throughout different parts of almost every song. Truth Lies starts of with a great riff and high energy, but is prone to lose energy when the guitars calm down.
I’d argue that Chiaroscuro demonstrates why the album is stagnant: the songwriting formula. Despite it having quite a few good parts, it keeps getting caught in the same chugging riff that just grows stale despite the lead guitar being quite interesting. Instrumentals require more finesse and variation to remain interesting and the reliance on a basic riff does not succeed in that category.
Caught between the chordal, prog-rock style that would lead them to Opus and the fast-paced riffing from their previous albums, Adramelch take the basic riff ideas and place them in a slower, more stripped-down context. They turn what could have been an interesting riff if more developed and faster into a near carbon copy each song. In almost every song, there is a riff based around chugging the tonic of the chord and then playing the full chord above that. While it is common riff style in rock and metal, it is usually varied in its frequency and melodic style. However, due to the more mid-tempo nature of the album, the melodic style is not able to evolve into more interesting riffs and since they are in almost every song, they quickly wear out their welcome.
To contrast the near constant complacency of the album that I have been building up, there is a lot to be like about this album. I think that this album has some of the best solos of Adramelch’s career, incorporating more feel into their solos while still flashing the fun dual guitar harmonies and lightning quick licks that peppered their earlier works. They come together to create new, and dynamic solos to get ripped out each song, each one a breath fresh air. Almost every song on the album has an enjoyable solo that makes the past few minutes better, and makes the listener look forward to what comes next. Going back to Truth Lies, the last minute and a half is filled with energetic riffs and the lead guitar taking over and the drums pick up the tempo through the end of the song.
In a way, this serves as a counter argument to the bland parts in the song, a reverse Wonderful Magician if you will, where the magic that makes Lights such an enjoyable song pops its head up once in a while in almost every song. While it might not be sustained greatness, it is certainly enough to break the monotony.
The album ends with the instrumental Oblivion, bringing back the themes and riffs of Lights but diverting into a more chordal and progressive ending. And so, we end where we begin, with a hint of what came before and what is to come. Without this album, Opus could not be made, as it is such a complete shift in direction that there needed to be a bridge between where they were and where they are now.
It is fitting that the cover art is two towers with two different shapes cut into them and empty land between them. Perhaps Lights From Oblivion wasn’t meant to be added to their list of greats, but it needed to be done. Artists don’t do everything perfectly the first time when trying something new, they need a canvas to experiment. Lights From Oblivion was that canvas, and that canvas is beautiful in some areas, and unpolished in others. But if there is one thing that is for sure, they now have a direction, and that direction is up.
Recommend Tracks:
Lights
Beyond a Lifetime
Aelegia
